tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31164423958491228222024-03-17T20:02:43.222-07:00Bits and PiecesHarry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.comBlogger406125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-38080094103352613212023-08-14T11:41:00.001-07:002023-08-14T11:41:32.532-07:00Arthur Augustus Johnson<p> This short bio of an interesting character appears in Harvard Magazine. Enjoy!</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/09/features-vita-arthur-augustus-johnson">https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/09/features-vita-arthur-augustus-johnson</a></p><p><br /></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-84935675029004727482023-07-01T21:43:00.000-07:002023-07-01T21:43:16.551-07:00The end of affirmative actionThe Crimson asked me to weigh in on the SCOTUS ruling against Harvard. My piece ("<a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/6/30/lewis-affirmative-action-unfinished/">Unfinished Business</a>") is now up. It's Harvard-specific. I don't think losing this case will actually matter much to Harvard, given that the majority opinion invites colleges to consider race in its admissions practices insofar as race matters to the experience of the individual applicant. Harvard's process is so unmechanized and individualized already that I bet the outcomes will be very similar in the future. Not so, I imagine, at other institutions reliant on rule-based systems for making admissions decisions. I do fear that the majority opinion will motivate "disadvantage" to be used as, and seen as, a proxy for racial classification. That may be fairer in one way, but it would incentivize a lot of whining by perfectly solid candidates about the traumas they have endured. The self-confident world-beaters with positive attitudes are going to be discouraged from presenting themselves that way. Again, though, Harvard at least will adjust; the Admissions folks know how many grains of salt with which to take application essays.<div>The bigger problem, of course, the problem for all of higher education, is that an institution that wants to "look like America" and admit students from across the spectrum of American high schools has to deal with the very high, and increasing, variance in the quality of American high schools. The paradoxes of fairness will not go away until that variance shrinks. (For example, should admissions offices, in an effort to favor the disadvantaged, penalize the low-income family that sacrificed all discretionary spending so they could move into a better school district where their kids would be better educated?) And while I would be glad to see Harvard and other universities work on that problem, I am skeptical that they can do much about it, since it is fundamentally political. America believes in local control and local funding of schools, and is skeptical of national standards and national curricula. Within those parameters, it seems to me that nationally representative universities like Harvard will continue to be dealing with enrolled students with sharply different levels of preparation.</div><div>(By the way, the other SCOTUS decision, on Biden's ambition to cancel student debt, is absolutely irrelevant to Harvard College, since undergraduates don't ordinarily graduate with significant debt. Of course it may affect students in the professional schools or in Continuing Education, some of whom have racked up significant debt before coming to Harvard or may borrow in order to attend Harvard's graduate schools.)</div>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-33553898388778784292022-12-15T19:50:00.002-08:002022-12-15T19:50:42.574-08:00Video recording of my Skolem Lecture on The Birth of Binary<p> A video recording of my <a href="https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/projects/infinity-and-intentionality-towards-a-new-synthesi/events/skolem-memorial-lecture.html">Skolem Lecture</a> in Oslo on the Birth of Binary is now available <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1fgLHpi7_KLhFvRBLNb99nJ-vLuJW3bQ7">here</a>.</p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 10px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic</p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 10px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The curious history of the binary number system includes a multimillennial prehistory and a few early seventeenth-century sparks that did not catch fire. Though several others independently came up with the binary system, my recent translation and edition (with British intellectual historian Lloyd Strickland) of mostly unpublished works on binary by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) establishes Leibniz as the key progenitor of the arithmetic used in today’s communications and computing technologies. I will review Leibniz’s research on binary notation, his increasingly sophisticated algorithms for binary arithmetic, his development of some rudiments of Boolean algebra to describe his calculus symbolically, his improvisation of a concatenation semigroup to describe patterns in bit strings, his plans for two different binary calculators, and his invention of what we now call hexadecimal notation, complete with four different notations for the hex digits, including the one in general use today. I will also comment on Leibniz’s efforts to universalize his invention by connecting it to Christian and Chinese traditions.</p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 10px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 10px 0px 25px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, holds AB and PhD degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. A member of the Harvard faculty since 1974, he has helped launch thousands of Harvard undergraduates, including both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, into careers in computer science. Principal architect of Harvard’s undergraduate computer science program, he served as Dean of Harvard College and interim dean of Harvard’s Engineering School and was the recipient of the IEEE’s 2021 Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. His recent books include an edited collection of classic computer science papers, “Ideas that Created the Future,” as well as “Leibniz on Binary” with Lloyd Strickland, both published by MIT Press.</i></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-28905770000658027662022-12-13T18:01:00.000-08:002022-12-13T18:01:47.906-08:00 Voter Suppression, Harvard-Style<p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">(This piece is jointly authored by Harry Lewis and Bill Gasarch, who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">There are elections in Hong Kong, but to get on the ballot you have to be nominated by a committee controlled by Beijing government.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers—one of Harvard’s two governing bodies—are almost as well-controlled. A Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) nominating committee curates a slate of candidates, from which alumni make their selections.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But an alternative route to get on the Harvard ballot exists, at least in theory. So-called “petition” candidates have always been rare—but after several climate activists were <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/harvard-divestment-advocates-win-overseer-seats" style="color: #954f72;">elected</a> in 2020, the rules were <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/harvard-governing-boards-change-overseers" style="color: #954f72;">changed</a> to make it even harder. Among other things, the number of petitions to get on the ballot was raised by a factor of fifteen, to more than three thousand. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">This year, noted civil libertarian <a href="https://www.harvey4harvard.com/" style="color: #954f72;">Harvey Silverglate</a>, concerned about freedom of expression at Harvard, is trying to make it onto the ballot. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The authors are computer scientists. We are neither technologically naïve nor afraid of computers. Harry has long been concerned about issues of <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/9/13/against-values-tests/" style="color: #954f72;">student freedom</a> and <a href="http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/12/shrouded_in_secrecy_decision_makers_gambled_and_harvard_lost/?page=1" style="color: #954f72;">Harvard governance</a>, and suggested to Bill, Harry’s sometime PhD student, that he sign <a href="https://www.harvey4harvard.com/petition" style="color: #954f72;">Silverglate’s petition</a>. This is an account of Bill’s trip through the resulting electronic purgatory.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">To add your name, you have to fill out a web form. To access the web form, you need a HarvardKey. To get a HarvardKey, you have to fill out another web form. So far, so good.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The HarvardKey web form wanted Bill’s 10-digit HAA ID, which he was told to find on the address sticker of his copy of a recent Harvard Magazine (sent to all alumni). Bill had one handy, so he looked and found … a 9-digit number. He tried entering that number—no luck. He noticed it began with three 0s, and tried adding a fourth—that did not work either. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The web form had a number to call. Someone answered, and said some information would be needed before dealing with digits. Name (fine). Year of degree (fine). MIDDLE name (well, fine, though no one but Bill’s mother ever used it, and only when indignant). Date of birth (well, OK, but now we’re getting into territory we don’t casually reveal any more). When he got his MASTER’s degree. Bill did not know—that’s just something Harvard gives en route to the PhD. Turned out he actually didn’t need to know, an estimate was good enough. The person on the phone gave him his HAA ID, which bore no relation to the number on his address sticker. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Let’s pause there. Some people never call tech support because they have never found it helpful to do so. Any such person with a 9-digit address sticker number could not participate in the petition process.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Bill entered his HAA ID and received an error message saying that … KEY-5003 was missing. Happily, Bill had kept the support person on the phone (this was not his first rodeo).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Missing KEY-5003 turned out to mean that Harvard did not have his email address. He supplied it and was told he would get an email confirmation later in the day.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">He did get an email later in the day. It listed eleven steps to claim his HarvardKey. Step 6 was to wait for a confirming email (he thought this WAS the confirming email), but after step 5 the system told him he was not in the system and it could not continue.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Another call to a support line. No, Bill was told, he has to wait 24 hours to get his email address updated, and would not get a confirming email. Just try tomorrow. Like the email said. Except that it didn’t say that, nor had the person he spoke to on the previous call.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Bill waited 24 hours and tried again, and got a little further through the eleven steps—and then was told to wait ANOTHER 24 hours for the account to activate. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">24 hours later he tried again, from home, and failed again. Then he went to his office and succeeded—no clue why.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now finally he got to the petition, which required Bill’s graduation year—and Silverglate’s, which Bill found but shouldn’t have been needed since this petition was specific to Silverglate.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Three days and two phone calls to sign the petition. To be fair, the people Bill spoke to on the phone were kind and helpful. Probably they themselves were struggling with the systems.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And we knew already that HAA is technologically challenged. A few weeks ago, it abruptly <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/11/alumni-email-forwarding-canceled/" style="color: #954f72;">announced</a> that it could no longer handle email forwarding. After alumni blowback, it just as abruptly <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/28/haa-reversal-email-forwarding/" style="color: #954f72;">announced</a> that it would NOT end its forwarding service—oddly, while cautioning that the service was unlikely ever to work very well. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">When election officials want to suppress the vote somewhere, they under-resource the voting process, forcing voters to cross town and wait in long lines. What happened to Bill is so comical that it is hard to imagine that the specifics were intentional. On the other hand, under-resourcing the petitioning process, allowing it to be so defective, misinformed, and hard to use that many people won’t exercise their franchise—isn’t that a form of voter suppression?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Why not be true to Harvard’s motto, <i>Veritas, </i>and just post on the web, “For the alumni to choose the Overseers is an anachronism. Today’s alumni voters can’t be trusted to do it wisely. Since we can’t get rid of this system, we are going to make it all but impossible to nominate by petition. Try if you wish, but if you do, abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”<o:p></o:p></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-32631819437907099622022-11-28T08:47:00.000-08:002022-11-28T08:47:36.620-08:00Skolem Lecture on "The Birth of Binary" – 8 December 2022<p>Following publication of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Binary-Invention-Computer-Arithmetic/dp/0262544342/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WBOH6MJZ2PUN&keywords=leibniz+on+binary&qid=1666806546&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjc2IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=Leibniz+%2Cstripbooks%2C86&sr=1-1">my edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of Leibniz's writings on binary arithmetic</a>, I'll be giving the annual Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture at the University of Oslo on December 8, and it will be both live-streamed and recorded. The lecture will be at 1:15pm Oslo time, which is 7:15am EST. Here is the full information, including the Zoom link (I imagine a link to the recording will at some point be posted on the last page linked below):</p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The 2022 Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University.</span></i></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The curious history of the binary number system includes a multimillennial prehistory and a few early seventeenth-century sparks that did not catch fire. Though several others independently came up with the binary system, my recent translation and edition (with British intellectual historian Lloyd Strickland) of mostly unpublished works on binary by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) establishes Leibniz as the key progenitor of the arithmetic used in today’s communications and computing technologies. I will review Leibniz’s research on binary notation, his increasingly sophisticated algorithms for binary arithmetic, his development of some rudiments of Boolean algebra to describe his calculus symbolically, his improvisation of a concatenation semigroup to describe patterns in bit strings, his plans for two different binary calculators, and his invention of what we now call hexadecimal notation, complete with four different notations for the hex digits, including the one in general use today. I will also comment on Leibniz’s efforts to universalize his invention by connecting it to Christian and Chinese traditions.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, holds AB and PhD degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. A member of the Harvard faculty since 1974, he has helped launch thousands of Harvard undergraduates, including both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, into careers in computer science. Principal architect of Harvard’s undergraduate computer science program, he served as Dean of Harvard College and interim dean of Harvard’s Engineering School and was the recipient of the IEEE’s 2021 Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. His recent books include an edited collection of classic computer science papers, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp/0262045303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lewis+ideas+that+created+the+future&qid=1595538528&s=books&sr=1-1">Ideas that Created the Future</a>,” as well as “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Binary-Invention-Computer-Arithmetic/dp/0262544342/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WBOH6MJZ2PUN&keywords=leibniz+on+binary&qid=1666806546&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjc2IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&s=books&sprefix=Leibniz+%2Cstripbooks%2C86&sr=1-1">Leibniz on Binary</a>” with Lloyd Strickland, both published by MIT Press.</span></i></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Time and place: December 8, 2022, 13:15 –15:00, <i>Georg Sverdrups hus (Universitetsbiblioteket), Blindern, Auditorium 1.</i></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It will be possible to follow the lecture on Zoom:</span></p><p style="color: #dca10d; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__uio.zoom.us_j_63956167845&d=DwMF-g&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=oHgaBYkd1_jjwzFcgYDGABrP1OSiEaYfUQRYlzQJY80&m=EFlkZktjG6gW4sl7lbLgq42fCg6GRwQVRZ86ooQTcMzXhkmMD3ul8MBF3HBEuVUG&s=2LnBsa3VTVP8zvtxy7mkXAphqJMA3SiJJ9ZtK1A6mak&e=" id="LPlnk336038" previewremoved="true">https://uio.zoom.us/j/63956167845</a></span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></span></p><p style="color: #dca10d; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fore more on the Skolem Lecture, see<i> </i> <a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.hf.uio.no_ifikk_english_research_groups_logic_events_&d=DwMF-g&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=oHgaBYkd1_jjwzFcgYDGABrP1OSiEaYfUQRYlzQJY80&m=EFlkZktjG6gW4sl7lbLgq42fCg6GRwQVRZ86ooQTcMzXhkmMD3ul8MBF3HBEuVUG&s=Dg0UVo8MOhE-4hohz0mj0xZU2OM6Bfhpf4RRmuIWX6w&e=" id="LPlnk792454" previewremoved="true">https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/groups/logic/events/</a>.</span></span></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-77703609791133574702022-11-18T12:07:00.004-08:002022-11-20T17:51:25.362-08:00 Virtue signaling, at the Kennedy School and elsewhere<p>The imperative to show our commitment to redress social injustices, even if it means overshooting the mark, takes Harvard to positions that are, if not literally indefensible, far beyond what most of the community would be willing to defend. Extreme positions may even offend and injure the very people they are voiced to advance. To declare such a position is "virtue signaling"--broadcasting to some audience our own good intentions, regardless of antipathy such declarations may excite in the general public or the resentment that may result in the affected population.</p><p>Some years ago, for example, I was in a faculty meeting where faculty candidates were to be chosen to receive offers. Someone said he would support any set of candidates, as long as at least one was a woman. This way of putting it simultaneously signaled flexibility, virtue, and determination to right a historical injustice. I cringed, and not just because such a stipulation would be, as I understood it, illegal if adopted broadly and not at all what Harvard means when it favors "affirmative action." That would have been enough, but I instinctively glanced around the room, wondering whether the women faculty present for the discussion were pleased to think their male colleagues were devoutly committed to gender diversity on the faculty--or were asking themselves if they had been deemed second-tier intellectually when they themselves were hired and were still thought of that way.</p><p>Something of the same strikes me about this scene, captured a couple of weeks ago in the men's room on the second floor of Wexner Hall at the Harvard Kennedy School. (No, I had not made a mistake about where I was; I left and double-checked that I was in the MEN's room, before re-entering to use the urinal.)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCaDTxMJOVWWTKYbZZzFSCHViKiBZ6UWZm79mlc6GsjV3CQ7sCCXNyjTkgAf3y5D4M5bI_cI_deNB_hIATMM6F-s6KR4AClc8jhRgnrpqzoD1Xr-PgUgHpyEFwoyXVtVZNYXU-8kFxqXh_to9_79tX73dkECa2NHsULsWJL_P-9PC7YQRh3i1eYhjE/s3024/HKS%20men's%20room.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCaDTxMJOVWWTKYbZZzFSCHViKiBZ6UWZm79mlc6GsjV3CQ7sCCXNyjTkgAf3y5D4M5bI_cI_deNB_hIATMM6F-s6KR4AClc8jhRgnrpqzoD1Xr-PgUgHpyEFwoyXVtVZNYXU-8kFxqXh_to9_79tX73dkECa2NHsULsWJL_P-9PC7YQRh3i1eYhjE/w400-h400/HKS%20men's%20room.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>As the availability of menstrual products in men's rooms is a new thing, it's fair to assume that the new stocking protocol responds to concerns of the kind voiced in the <a href="https://aninjusticemag.com/campaign-featuring-transgender-men-draws-ire-toward-trans-women-faf5fe999caa">People Have Periods </a>campaign, showing transgender men menstruating.</p><p>Now I don't doubt that some trans men have periods and haven't carried supplies with them, but I doubt it's a common occurrence. Trans men usually stop menstruating within a year of <span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">within a year of the time they start on testosterone. </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80); font-family: inherit;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Weiselberg, E., 2022. Menstrual considerations for transgender male and gender diverse adolescents who were assigned female at birth. </span><i style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care</i><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">, p.101239.</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">) So this accommodation is for a minority of a minority of a minority--trans men, in the first year of their transition, who have forgotten to carry supplies with them. It would not swell the number much to add a few forgetful nonbinary menstruating individuals who use the men's room when they have to make a choice.</span></span></p><p>Whatever the number might be, it is surely smaller than the number of people who might benefit from stocking public bathrooms with other items. For example, it must be less than the number who have nicked themselves and just need a bandaid--and have to walk around the corner to CVS to buy a box rather than bleeding in public, bathrooms not having been stocked with free bandaids. Or the number of people who, like me, wish there were sharps receptacles in more bathrooms, because we use syringes, lancets, and subcutaneous needles for medical therapies. (Most such sharps now come with plastic sheaths, but it is still improper to toss them in the paper towel bin, where they are hazardous to custodians. And implanting some devices, such as the <a href="https://www.medtronicdiabetes.com/download-library/silhouette-infusion-set">Silhouette infusion set</a>, leaves the user with a nastily evil unsheathed needle to get rid of.) </p><p>So the sanitary product display seems to me the essence of virtue signaling--doing something not for what it actually accomplishes but for what it says about the way others feel about the affected group. Now one might counter that yes, it is exactly because trans men are a socially marginalized group, while shavers and diabetics are not, that it is important to make small gestures--such as stocking men's rooms with sanitary products--to show <i>them and everyone else</i> that they are welcome and included.</p><p>But there's a problem, and it's the same worry I have about hire-a-woman declarations in faculty meetings. Trans men who have planned ahead may not want to be reminded, and to have others reminded, that they have periods. The publication cited above on this subject says, "<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80); color: #505050; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> [M]</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">enstruation for transgender males, and other gender diverse individuals assigned female at birth, may be anything but celebratory. …</span></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80); color: #505050; font-family: Georgia, serif;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80); font-family: inherit;">Menstruation or the anticipation of menarche for many transgender males is often met with worsening of dysphoria, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. Therefore, to meet the physiologic and psychologic needs of transgender males, one needs to be aware of issues that may be present in relation to menstruation and be knowledgeable on how to medically proceed with sensitivity and respect toward one's gender identity."</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">In any case, it seems likely to this old-fashioned integrationist that that trans men may generally wish to be treated as men, not as trans men, in the same way I expect that most women faculty wish to be treated by their peers as faculty first and women faculty secondarily. It also seems to me that the most likely result of putting those supplies in the </span></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">men's</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);"> room is not that they will be used, but that some bozo will </span></span></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">throw them on the floor or into the trash, someone else will discover that and complain to university officials, who will express their outrage and solidarity and promulgate a re-education program on the Harvard community such as we already receive on other social issues affecting the workplace and classroom.</span></p><p>Those who have made the difficult decision to change their gender deserve our support, just as efforts to diversify the faculty are worthy when they do not conflict with deeper principles. Showy public gestures, in the place of more substantive help, are acts of politics more than of kindness. They are ways to get Harvard to stake out its position in American culture wars. I do hope the University can become less political in the future and refocused on academic issues instead.</p><p>Of course, it is also possible this was all just a mistake made by a sleepless janitor!</p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-47497949528064057912022-11-03T18:13:00.001-07:002022-11-03T18:13:21.362-07:00Harvard Alumni: Sign Harvey Silverglate's petition to get on the ballot for the Overseers<p> Noted civil libertarian and free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate is trying to be elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. I know Harvey well and have never met a more principled person -- and on top of that, I admire the principles he stands for and his way of defending them, even though we don't always agree on how they should play out in practice. He is exactly the kind of no-BS person who should be on the Board of Overseers to challenge Harvard's authoritarian tendencies and the verbal dreck Harvard too often uses to justify positions that cannot survive rational scrutiny.</p><p>Most Overseer nominees are selected by an HAA committee, but there is a process for alumni to nominate additional names to appear on the ballot. That process involves collecting quite a few nominations from alumni. If you hold a Harvard degree and are not currently on the Harvard payroll, you are eligible to add your name to the petitioners.</p><p>The link is on Harvey's web site: <a href="https://www.harvey4harvard.com/">https://www.harvey4harvard.com/</a>, where you can learn more about him. When you click through to fill out the petition, you need to fill in your own name and degree information (Harvard School and year of degree) as well as Harvey Silverglate's (Harvard Law School, 1967). Please do it now -- he needs more than 3000 signatures over roughly the next 90 days -- and tell your Harvard-educated friends and relatives to do so too!</p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-23424341806228304972022-10-21T11:50:00.002-07:002022-10-21T15:18:16.385-07:00 Upcoming lectures on two recent books<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">I’ll be a keynote speaker at the</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><a href="https://www.tale2022.org/home" style="color: #954f72;">IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE)</a><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">in December. My topic is “</span><a href="https://www.tale2022.org/speakers" style="color: #954f72;">Why and How to Teach the Classic Papers</a><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">,” and I will be describing the experience of reading about 50 classic computer science papers with about 150 computer science students per year. The course is Harvard’s CS191, and I have collected the papers, each with a brief introduction, into an MIT Press volume</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045308/ideas-that-created-the-future/" style="color: #954f72;">Ideas That Created the Future</a><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">, now in its third printing.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This conference is in Hong Kong. I will be speaking remotely on the evening of December 4 Boston time, morning of December 5 in Hong Kong.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Also, I will be delivering (in person!) the annual <a href="https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/groups/logic/events/" style="color: #954f72;">Thoralf Skolem memorial lecture</a> at the University of Oslo on the afternoon of December 8. Skolem was an influential mathematician and logician; several of my early papers were inspired by his work on reduction classes for the predicate calculus, through which I became a friend and collaborator of the combinatorial genius Stål Aanderaa (known to computer scientists mainly as one parent of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aanderaa%E2%80%93Karp%E2%80%93Rosenberg_conjecture" style="color: #954f72;">Aanderaa-Karp-Rosenberg conjecture</a>). Among the delights of this honor is the opportunity to once again see my old friend, with whom I did <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-symbolic-logic/article/abs/linear-sampling-and-the-case-of-the-decision-problem1/8DF98E8375DB113E6B45B89C84767527" style="color: #954f72;">some of the most challenging work</a> of my career.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The subject of my Skolem lecture will be “<a href="https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/projects/infinity-and-intentionality-towards-a-new-synthesi/events/skolem-memorial-lecture.html" style="color: #954f72;">The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic</a>,” based on my <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544344/leibniz-on-binary/" style="color: #954f72;">edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of thirty-two of Leibniz’s writings on binary</a> (about to be published by MIT Press).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Both of these talks will be aimed at non-specialists and should be of broad interest. I hope that the Skolem lecture will be livecast, but have not gotten confirmation about that yet.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">PS. Let me take this opportunity to flag what Don Knuth had to say after reading Leibniz on Binary (this arrived too late to appear on the back cover):</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">“This book is a model of how the history of computer science and mathematics should be written. Leibniz pointed out the importance of putting ourselves into the place of others, and here we get to put ourselves into the shoes of Leibniz himself, as we're treated to dozens of his private notes, carefully translated into idiomatic English and thoroughly explained.”<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 700 !important;">—Don Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming, Stanford University</span></p></blockquote>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-72697485927456444242022-10-19T19:31:00.003-07:002022-10-19T19:35:10.096-07:00An early Harvard report on women's athletics<p> Harvard took over responsibility for women's athletics in 1974. Until then, such teams as existed were administered by Radcliffe College, then a legally independent entity. This transition was one of several steps that eventually (but not rapidly) led to the end of the asymmetric status of women students at Harvard.</p><p>In connection with the ongoing commemoration of Title IX (which was enacted into law at about the same time, but was not then seen as having much to do with women's athletic opportunities), I found this <i><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bjY69UKEsrxou0GgdXX69UOImDIYvy2A/view?usp=sharing">Position Statement on Nomenclature for Men's and Women's Teams at Harvard</a>, </i>written in 1983. While limited in scope, it is a masterpiece of logic and precision, and I post it here for the historical record since it does not seem to be readily available elsewhere. I had seen it years ago, but hadn't even remembered it until I was at a basketball game a few years ago in which the Harvard women's team was playing the TCU "Lady Horned Frogs"--the sort of diminutive this report outlawed at Harvard.</p><p>Among the notable things about the report is the professional distinction of the Faculty members who came up with it, and the lack of any political disproportion among those achieving consensus on what were even then politically fraught issues. It would be hard at Harvard today to assemble a committee that politically balanced--if you also expected that its members would come up with anything of significance.</p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-45511443597833292222022-04-21T17:52:00.003-07:002022-06-14T00:30:12.219-07:00Preregistration is the Enemy of Liberal Education, and Other Crimson Op-Eds<p>The Harvard Crimson yesterday published my op-ed on preregistration (AKA the end of "shopping period"), a matter expected to be voted by the Faculty on May 3. (On this matter, see also the excellent <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/05/letters-mj22">letters</a> in Harvard Magazine by Howard Georgi and an impressive list of alumni, not that I expect such sentiments to have much traction with the faculty or the current administration.) I have long been puzzled that the humanities faculty seem favorably disposed toward preregistration, which will mark the end of any hope they have of attracting new students into their fields. As the College becomes more consumer-oriented and the socioeconomic profile of the student body shifts, however gradually, toward the inclusion of more disadvantaged students, it will become more, not less, important for the humanities to make their case to the incoming 18-year-olds about their fields, because, given the state of secondary education in America, those students will not arrive at Harvard thinking the humanities are anything but an exotic luxury for the well-to-do.</p><p>Here is the op-ed.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/4/20/lewis-preterm-registration/" style="color: #954f72;">Preregistration is the Enemy of Liberal Education</a> (April 20, 2022)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now while I was at it, I thought I would pull together everything I have written for the Crimson over the years. I think this is the full list but I may be missing something; do let me know if you spot an omission. In some cases the Crimson itself doesn't have an active version, and I have resorted either to the Internet Archive or to my own records.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/2/27/letter-lewis-athletes-change-minds/" style="color: #954f72;">Athletes Can Change Their Minds, Too</a> (Letter to the Editor, February 27, 2020)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/PDF/2017/1/31/lewis-lettter-khurana/" style="color: #954f72;">Lewis Letter to Khuran</a>a (about single-gender social organizations; January 31, 2017)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/PDF/2017/1/31/lewis-lettter-khurana/" style="color: #954f72;">No Values Tests</a> (with Eric Nelson, Margo Seltzer, and Richard Thomas; September 13, 2016)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/11/Harvard-mandela-speech/" style="color: #954f72;">Mandela and Harvard</a> (December 11, 2013)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/26/peter-harvard-moral-university/" style="color: #954f72;">Remembering Peter Gomes</a> (May 26, 2011)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/6/4/copyright-harvard-2008-an-act-for/" style="color: #954f72;">Copyright Harvard 2008</a> (June 4, 2008)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/9/30/we-shouldnt-be-afraid-of-the/" style="color: #954f72;">We Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Truth</a> (Letter to the Editor, September 30, 2008)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130810112650/https:/www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/11/8/stumbling-blocks-span-stylefont-style-italiclet-us/" style="color: #954f72;">Stumbling Blocks</a> (November 8, 2007)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/6/7/what-happened-rabbit-and-owl-were/" style="color: #954f72;">What Happened?</a> (June 7, 2007)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/20/talking-about-elections-identifiers-must-be/" style="color: #954f72;">Talking About Elections, Identifiers Must be Qualified</a> (Letter to the Editor, April 20, 2007)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/10/27/college-sends-grads-off-with-exhortation/" style="color: #954f72;">College Sends Grads Off with Exhortation to “Serve Society”</a> (Letter to the Editor, October 27, 2006)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/10/13/memorial-hall-transept-should-honor-the/" style="color: #954f72;">Memorial Hall Transept Should Honor the Dead</a> (Letter to the Editor, October 13, 2006)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/6/7/lessons-for-the-future-crises-can/" style="color: #954f72;">Lessons for the Future</a> (June 7, 2006)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/4/21/amateurism-on-and-off-the-field/" style="color: #954f72;">Amateurism On and Off the Field</a> (April 21, 2006)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/4/21/amateurism-on-and-off-the-field/" style="color: #954f72;">Donors, Not Harvard, Should Give to Relief Efforts</a> (Letter to the Editor, October 24, 2005)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/9/12/in-memory-of-archie-epps-archie/" style="color: #954f72;">In Memory of Archie Epps</a> (September 12, 2003)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/6/5/shopping-for-an-education-imany-shall/" style="color: #954f72;">Shopping for an Education</a> (June 5, 2003)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/11/4/harvard-in-a-beer-ad-world-its/" style="color: #954f72;">Harvard in a Beer-Ad World</a> (November 4, 2002)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/9/11/harvard-in-america-a-year-later/" style="color: #954f72;">Harvard in America, a Year Later</a> (September 11, 2002)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2001/9/14/things-to-think-about-ithe-following/" style="color: #954f72;">Things to Think About</a> (September 14, 2001)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2001/4/23/the-racial-theory-of-grade-inflation/" style="color: #954f72;">The Racial Theory of Grade Inflation</a> (April 23, 2001)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/11/29/raise-the-council-fee-pshould-the/" style="color: #954f72;">Raise the Council Fee</a> (November 29, 1999)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/2/12/romance-and-love-at-harvard-pbobitempora/" style="color: #954f72;">Romance and Love at Harvard</a> (February 19, 1999)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://lewis.seas.harvard.edu/pages/tales-chad-box" style="color: #954f72;">Tales from the Chad Box</a> (Fifteen Minutes; February 12, 1999)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070308131900/https:/www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=92449" style="color: #954f72;">College’s Actions Justified in Reporting Elster’s Arrest</a> (Letter to the Editor; February 19, 1998)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070308131941/https:/www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=117472" style="color: #954f72;">Clarifying the College’s Policy on Alcohol</a> (Letter to the Editor; October 24, 1997)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050223180535/http:/www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=122301" style="color: #954f72;">Letter to the Editor</a> (alcohol policy; February 21, 1996)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1995/12/6/logical-progress-for-pbha-pbhbarvard-university/" style="color: #954f72;">Logical Process for PBHA</a> (with Theda Skocpol; December 6, 1995)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-22161861238898161492022-03-07T12:37:00.002-08:002022-03-07T14:16:06.340-08:00Harvard College moves toward a planned educational economy<p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> A recent meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was devoted largely to undergraduate education. That is a rarity, and an uninformed reader, hearing that, might hope that the tragic crisis in Europe had resulted in some introspection on the larger purpose of higher education in a democracy, along the lines that motivated the educational classic, <a href="https://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp/page/n11/mode/2up">General Education in a Free Society</a> (aka Harvard’s 1945 “Red Book”). After all, for better or worse, Harvard educates many leaders of state, much of the judiciary, and many titans of industry. Harvard has a role in determining whether future leaders can grapple with the conflicting values underpinning the survival of civilization.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Alas, none of that came up in the March 1 meeting. Instead, the educational items on the agenda included (I was not there and am relying on the writeup in <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/03/harvard-shopping-week-undergraduate-courses-and-concentrations">Harvard Magazine</a>):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">1)<span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Should Harvard allow double concentrations?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">2)<span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Should students be allowed to take more than a couple of professional school courses toward their undergraduate degrees?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">3)<span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><!--[endif]-->Should students be required to choose what courses they plan to take well in advance of the beginning of the term?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The affirmative answers to these questions seem to have been presented mainly as bureaucratic adjustments. References to educational objectives in the proposals seem to be outnumbered by references to orderliness and efficiency. Most telling is that neither the president, nor the dean of the Faculty, nor the dean of the College seems to have framed these issues at all or to have contributed to the discussion. Speaking on behalf of the proposals were members of the committees making them and a subdean four levels down from the top. That follows a historical trend: The Red Book was the brainchild of President Conant, the Core Curriculum of FAS Dean Rosovsky, the Gen Ed II review was entrusted to the dean of the College, and so on. Undergraduate education gets pushed lower in the Harvard org chart every time it is considered.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I have <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2021/12/harvard-loses-piece-of-its-souland-then.html">blogged about preregistration</a> before, and not much to counter my concerns seems to have come up in the meeting. I would pose but one question prompted by a passage from the Magazine’s reportage. (This is a rhetorical question because as a retired faculty member, I am no longer entitled to ask such a question in a Faculty meeting.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">If everything worked as the committee proposed, Nickel said, “All of us will benefit,” with undergraduates gaining confidence that they could actually take the courses they chose and course heads planning better so they can “make pedagogical choices that work.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Which does that mean?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">(a) faculty will respond to unexpected enrollment surges, now known far in advance, by increasing their teaching staff, or<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">(b) course caps and lotteries will have been routinized and executed so far in advance that students will have time to “choose” alternatives in an orderly way, when they are denied entry to the courses they actually want to take?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I suspect the latter, because no one seems to have suggested the former.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">When I chose the title of this post, I was trying to see what all these incremental changes have to do with each other. The common thread is that education should be a well-planned, purposive activity. Students should decide, among the wares offered by the faculty for reasons of their own, which ones they wish to acquire. If those are professional training courses, no problem. Faculty should know, well in advance, how much of their own teaching they wish to offer to students, and not be personally bothered by student demand exceeding their supply; let some algorithm sort it out before classes start. Students who want to fit the jig-saw pieces of Harvard’s course offerings together in a way that maximizes the number of decorations on their diplomas should be rewarded for doing so, even if it limits their opportunities for educational speculation and serendipity. What Harvard is offering is an expensive product, and our main objective should be to make sure students can take away the maximum value, within the limits of faculty willingness to accommodate excess demand.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I am amazed that the humanities faculty have not resisted this drift more vocally. Ironically, it seems to be the computer science faculty who spoke most loudly against pre-planning, which will hurt the humanities the most and probably only benefit the STEM fields.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In any case, we are surely a long way from the days when the Harvard faculty thought it was their job to preserve the idea of human freedom and to educate students who would not let civilization perish. For all of our institutional commitment to social justice, isn’t it time to remind ourselves of those even deeper and larger purposes, on which we can act with tools no other institution has to the same degree at its disposal, the full-time, four-year attention of much of the nation’s future leadership?</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><style class="WebKit-mso-list-quirks-style">
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</style>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-80289389661005264862022-02-14T19:28:00.000-08:002022-02-14T19:28:06.541-08:00In memory of Fred Abernathy<p>My colleague and friend Fred Abernathy passed away a few days ago, at the age of 91. A fine obituary is <a href="https://burkefamilyfuneralhomes.com/book-of-memories/4850075/Abernathy-Frederick/index.php">here</a>. Fred was my mentor and collaborator in several of my loving criticisms of Harvard; one of them I detailed <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2010/12/governing-harvard.html">on this blog</a>; see also Harvard Magazine's <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/breaking-news/harvard-president-hints-changes-in-university-governance">account</a>. And it was Fred who, in his innocent, shambling way,<a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/breaking-news/harvard-president-hints-changes-in-university-governance"> asked President Summers</a> why Harvard was so vigorously defending its actions in the Harvard-in-Russia scandal. The Faculty room's collective gasp at the president's in artful response (to use Alan Dershowitz's characterization) was the beginning of the end of the Summers presidency. But there was more to Fred than all that; he invariably kind to students of every variety, and was Harvard's energy watchdog before that was fashionable.</p><p>Like many others, I will miss him. I spoke at his Zoom memorial service; my tribute is posted below. I tried to write something Fred would enjoy.</p><p><br /></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Uncle Fred.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am not sure who first referred to Fred that way. It might have been Mike McElroy. Or it might have been me, or someone else. But as I tried to take stock of what we have lost with Fred’s passing, it’s the phrase that keeps pushing to the front of my mind.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fred was, to be sure, an avuncular figure. Kind and funny, with a big laugh, never hiding behind a locked door, warm and genial. So comfortable in his own skin that his frustrations and disappointments, and he had some, always came out with humor rather than anger. He could go on the offensive, but the attacks were never launched as a fist against a chin. They were rather as a pinprick against a balloon. No one who was in the Faculty Room on February 7, 2006, will ever forget Fred’s dry observation about Harvard settling some litigation with the federal government, to the tune of $31 million dollars, over a faculty shell game. “It appears to me,” Fred said, “Harvard was defending the indefensible.” Poof!</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But to me, and, I expect, to many others, Fred was close to being a real uncle and not just an admirably avuncular figure. What are uncles for? Uncles (and aunts too) are the people to whom you turn when you are in despair about your relation to your parents. Your uncle understands your parents, and can be honest with you about them because he isn’t compromised by your relation to them. </span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the parent, for these purposes, is Harvard, of course. And its sundry deans and transient presidents, who come and go while the faculty remain anchored in place. Fred knew Harvard and its weaknesses and foibles. Not to complicate the metaphor, but he was Harvard’s son too.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When I joined the faculty, DEAP, as it was then known, was a small place. And yet I felt isolated within it. There was little family feel among the skeletal group of computer scientists. Some were intensely rivalrous; some were just nuts; more than one were sleeping with their graduate students. It was the senior mechanical engineers who showed me how practitioners of a mature science behave. They let me tag along to their lunches at the old Legal Seafoods in Inman Square. It was Fred and Annamaria who made me and Marlyn welcome in their home. It was at Fred’s office, stacked to the ceiling with books and journals, where the door was always open for me to wander in, toy with stuff, and chat. It was Fred who made me feel, to use today’s lingo, included and belonging, and taught me how to transfer that feeling to others. Fred taught me not just how to be a professor, but how to be a good member of the Harvard family.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I was always amazed at how much Fred knew about the inside-baseball of Harvard, and how his prescience in the energy field made him an especially valuable loving critic of the institution. I remember Fred pointing out the absurdity that even as late as 2005, Harvard built a brand new building, 60 Oxford Street, which in midwinter was pumping into the frigid outside air the heat it had extracted at great cost from electronic equipment, at the same time as it was burning fossil fuels to heat the building’s offices, badly. A metaphor for Harvard’s centralized dysfunction, as though heating and cooling were different departments, each jealously defending its turf against interference by the other, lest both be put out of business.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 29px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ah, Fred, we will miss you. You were so good to us and so good for Harvard.</span></p><p> </p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-38760950950337901152021-12-20T10:51:00.001-08:002021-12-20T13:20:44.284-08:00Parents and preregistration<p> <span face="Calibri, sans-serif">A few years ago, the computer science faculty took it upon themselves to increase the number of first-year advisors in their ranks. They had grown frustrated at advice commonly given to first-years planning to study CS, especially to women and underrepresented minorities: Don’t take CS your first term, it’s too hard, wait and get your feet underneath you before you try it. I signed up one colleague who I knew would be especially supportive of such students. She called me after meeting her first advisee for the first time. “OK, you got me into this,” she said. “What do I do now?” A young man had come into her office and announced that he actually did</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">not</b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">want to study CS, even though that is what he had said on his Harvard application and that had been his special talent in high school. “I want to become a studio artist.,” he said. “I had to wait until my mother dropped me off before I could tell anyone that.” My colleague asked what to do. Here I had recruited her as an advisor to improve retention, and she was failing before she had even opened her mouth.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">“Tell him congratulations, and steer him to X [the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the studio art department],” I said. “He figured out something about himself before his first class. That sometimes takes years.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I thought of this incident after <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2021/12/harvard-loses-piece-of-its-souland-then.html" style="color: #954f72;">my previous post about shopping period</a>. I wrote there, accurately but rather too casually, the following:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-size: 11.5pt;">Maybe the students with college-educated parents, the ones who grew up in households with books all around them, can figure out whether they'd rather take a course in Shakespeare or Schopenhauer. But what about the priority Harvard has placed on enrolling more low-income, socioeconomically disadvantaged students? The best ever students from the least of America's high schools? The ones we are so concerned to make feel included and belonging? How on earth can they begin to make rational course decisions before even setting foot in Cambridge?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The trouble with this formulation is that it suggests that the problem is informational and is restricted to one kind of parent. That students with educated parents will make better advisors because they know more about college and the subjects colleges teach than less well educated parents, and because of that inequity the new plan, which would have incoming first year students choose their first courses at home in early summer, might be especially bad for those students coming from less well educated families.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But as I stress elsewhere in that post, the advising problem is typically <b>not</b> mainly informational. The problem students need to solve is not to match their goals against the course catalog so they can pick out those courses that match their ambitions the best. It’s to figure out what goals they should have, and to challenge the goals they come to college already having set for themselves—most often under the heavy influence of parents and other family members. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">As the competition to get into Harvard has increased, the burden on some students not to “waste” or “mess up” the opportunity has also increased. In my experience the pressure not to disappoint family members—by choosing an unconventional path or leaving college entirely—has been especially tough on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and students from non-college-education backgrounds. How many such parents, having made personal sacrifices and having staked their hopes for the future on their child’s prospects for a world-class education, would be as sanguine as the Gates and Zuckerberg parents seem to have been about their child dropping out?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But those are far from the only parents who may fail to support their children’s best interests in the new pick-your-courses-at-home world. What we used to benignly call “helicoptering” by better-off parents has also not gone away. Indeed, it has assumed a more malignant form in recent years, as part of larger changes in the way Americans view academia and expertise in general. Remember when Harvard administrators got stung trying to <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/12/17/placemats-admin-apologizes/" style="color: #954f72;">coach first-year students on how to talk to their parents</a> about race and diversity when they went home for Thanksgiving? Harvard presumed that in two months their wards would have seen the light, but were still unsophisticated enough to stumble trying to awaken others. Such excesses of wokeness (including the campaign against the allegedly exclusionary phrase “<a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2021/08/pregnant-women.html" style="color: #954f72;">pregnant women</a>”) have left many parents thinking academics are a poor source of advice about the things that matter most to their children’s future. Take your courses and get your degree, goes the parting advice, you need that—but don’t listen to all the nonsense.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">All of which is to say that parents of every kind are not going to leave their pre-matriculating Harvard students alone to make their own course choices—choices that may be extremely consequential as they set off on their journey to become true adults, no longer tethered to their families for their life choices.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">When I was dean of the College, I used to send some advice to incoming students in the summer before their arrival on campus. It was an attempt to get them to focus in the future on the quality of their achievements rather than the quantity. I called it “<a href="https://lewis.seas.harvard.edu/files/harrylewis/files/slowdown2004.pdf" style="color: #954f72;">Slow Down: How to get more out of Harvard by doing less</a>.” I quite intentionally did not wait until they arrived on campus and had gotten away from their parents to deliver this message. In fact, I continued sending this letter by paper mail, addressed to the students, to their home addresses, even after email distribution became feasible and cheap. I did that because I <b>wanted </b>parents to read it too, and I knew that the surest way to get parents’ eyes on that letter was to address it to the students themselves at their home addresses. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I do wonder who Harvard thinks will be filling out those course-selection forms in July before matriculation.<o:p></o:p></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-34689063250565125412021-12-16T16:10:00.005-08:002021-12-20T12:49:00.084-08:00 Harvard loses a piece of its soul—and then another<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">For the past 20 years or so, Harvard has been trying to rid itself, bit by bit, of its distinctiveness. At the same time as it touts its numbers of Rhodes winners and the size of its mammoth gifts, it has been striving to make itself function as a university like any other.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> Unique local i</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">nstitutions, ones that don't conform to the general norms and forms of American higher education, are seen as anachronistic curiosities, serving no useful purpose, retained only to indulge the sentimentality of old timers. To make ourselves modern, goes the apparent logic, we must become less unique.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Some of the changes have been superficial. I thought it was a mistake to retire the title of “Senior Tutor” for the chief academic officer in a House, in favor of “Resident Dean.” Everybody is a dean of some kind now, and “Tutor” nicely suggested that these individuals had academic roles. This change was made strictly in the interests of modernization, oddly only a few months before a period of intense student advising was dubbed “Advising Fortnight.” It became sillier when the House Masters were restyled as “Faculty Deans” for political reasons, even though the Resident Deans are faculty too, and even though the ancient use of “Master” as an academic title had nothing to do with slaveholding. The title was just an easy, no-cost thing to give away, and doing so placated some who found it offensive.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Though these changes were mistakes, they were of no real significance. Students and faculty went on with their business barely noticing that the changes had been made. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">This semester, by contrast, has brought two changes that make me wonder if the change agents know what they are doing—if they understand the actual purpose and significance of now deprecated structures.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">A long and detailed report <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/12/10/fas-committee-recommends-ending-shopping-week/" style="color: #954f72;">recommends</a> that “shopping week” be eliminated in favor of preregistration weeks in advance of the first day of classes. Even first year students will have to choose their courses by July. The fact that this change is deeply unpopular with students is not the most important thing about it. The important thing, which the report seems to have completely missed, is that “shopping” is educationally valuable.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The term “shopping” was always sure to set faculty teeth on edge—though not reasonably, it seems to me. The same faculty who are diffident about the idea that they might compete with other faculty for student enrollments surely shopped <i>themselves</i> around when they got hired, touring different institutions, trying to make the best case they could for the importance of their scholarship and the quality of their teaching, and then they negotiated for salaries and research funds, or at least compared competing offers before choosing to come to Harvard. And here students are consumers in a marketplace of ideas. It should offend no one that students wander among philosophy and art history courses, and computer science and statistics courses, before deciding whose classroom experience will teach them the most over 13 weeks.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But something deeper than offense at market forces is at stake. Harvard is an educational institution, not a training school. People form their identities here. They don’t simply paint by numbers on a canvas that was outlined before they arrived. Harvard captures students at the transition to adulthood, at a moment when they are likely to have the freedom to decide who they are—and when they need no longer persist in the identity with which they graduated from high school. Such opportunities for change are rare and precious in human life.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Requiring students to decide, months in advance, what courses they are going to take overwhelmingly biases their choices in conservative directions, towards fulfillment of a plan that might better be abandoned or diverted by some opportunistic nudge. In my <i>Harvard Magazine </i>piece <i><a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born" style="color: #954f72;">A Science is Born</a>, </i>I tried to explain how IBM Fellow Patricia Selinger got into computer science.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">Nat Sci 110 changed lives, Selinger’s for one. Bored in her introductory logic course by the eminent but mumbling Pierce professor of philosophy Willard V.O. Quine, Selinger looked for a course that met in closer proximity to her 10 A.M. physics lecture so she would not always be arriving late, relegated to the back row. Thus she stumbled into Bossert’s passion for making computing interesting and fun. A few years later she finished her Ph.D. on programming languages and systems under the direction of Chuck Prenner, Ph.D. ’72, a student of Cheatham’s who had moved on from being his TF [teaching fellow] to assistant professor. Then Bill Joyner, another member of our group who had gone to work at IBM Research, aggressively recruited her. At IBM Selinger made fundamental contributions to database query optimization—the technology that makes it possible to find needles in haystacks without going through every stalk. In 1994 she was awarded IBM’s highest scientific honor, IBM Fellow. All because Nat Sci 110 was taught in a lecture hall near the physics building. Geography is destiny.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Choosing courses by the location of their classrooms—that sure sounds anti-intellectual. But the point is that <i>any</i> kind of disruption can be helpful in jarring nineteen-year-olds loose from their conceptions of themselves—low grades did it for me, a comment from a roommate or teammate did it for some friends, and so on.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Maybe the students with college-educated parents, the ones who grew up in households with books all around them, can figure out whether they'd rather take a course in Shakespeare or Schopenhauer. But what about the priority Harvard has placed on enrolling more low-income, socioeconomically disadvantaged students? The best ever students from the least of America's high schools? The ones we are so concerned to make feel included and belonging? How on earth can they begin to make rational course decisions before even setting foot in Cambridge?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">It was always Harvard’s glory that nobody expected you to stay the same—that if you acknowledged not knowing where you were going, that was a positive, an indicator that you understood you were incomplete as a human being and came to Harvard, in part, to grow. You were taking control of yourself. I fear that administrative convenience (supported by some unconvincing arguments about the impossibility of predictive enrollment models) is pushing Harvard toward becoming a place for preprofessional training, where students will arrive expected to know what they plan to become and what they are going to study, and will then spend four years executing their plan. Many will successfully do exactly that, until they wake up in a cold sweat senior year—or a decade or two later—wondering how they wound up so dissatisfied with their perfectly executed and utterly unexamined lives.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And as if that were not bad enough: Commencement is being split off from reunions.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Graduation is on a Thursday. The formal exercises are in the morning, diplomas are handed out at lunchtime, and the afternoon is the annual meeting of the alumni association. The new graduates join the rest of the alumni to hear the major speaker. Class and professional school reunions take place in the days before and after Commencement. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">That is how it has worked in the past. In the future, the alumni will not be invited to Commencement. Reunions will take place a few days away from Commencement, after the graduates have left.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The change has not been explained, or even really announced. I can guess why it is happening. Commencement has gotten very crowded. Partly that is because transcontinental and transoceanic travel are much easier than they were decades ago, so more family members and alumni now return to Cambridge. Partly it is because Harvard is minting degree recipients faster than it used to, because it is offering more one and two year Masters programs and has grown its School of Continuing Education. And partly it is because graduates have more parents and grandparents than they used to (an unexpected result of the nation’s high divorce rate!), and they tend to live longer than the parents and grandparents of earlier generations of graduates.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">So it is hard to get Commencement tickets, hotels are expensive, and so on. As with the end of shopping period, I am sure there will be great gains in administrative convenience when students and alumni are kept from being in the Yard simultaneously.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But something essential, some piece of Harvard’s soul, is being abandoned in treating students and alumni as disjoint groups. One of the most precious things one acquires by matriculating is becoming a member of the Harvard <i>family.</i> We treat each other with deference, with care. It is a fine thing for graduating students to brush up against alumni. That can still happen, of course. But for graduating students to witness the metamorphosis as a specific moment in in their lives is priceless. A graduation ceremony without alumni is just an ending, not both an ending and a beginning.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">So much will be irretrievably lost from those encounters between alumni and new graduates. A sense of the depth of time, for example. I remember at my 50th reunion reflecting to a graduating senior that the Vietnam war was as distant for her as World War I had been for us when we graduated. The Great War had then seemed unimaginably far in the past for us, but Vietnam was with us then and has stayed with us every day of our lives.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And the sea-change in the Harvard student body, and thus in Harvard itself, evidenced by the visible shift in the appearance of the alumni and alumnae as the generations march past the seniors to fill Tercentenary Theater on Thursday afternoon. Will, perhaps, Harvard now remove from the Yard gate by the Science Center Plaza the now anachronistic plaque recording Emerson’s soul-chilling thoughts on witnessing the alumni procession on Commencement Day?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><i>I went to the College Jubillee on the 8th instant. A noble & well thought of anniversary. The pathos of the occasion was extreme & not much noted by the speakers. Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts; but on that day the anointed eye saw the crowd of spirits that mingled with the procession in the vacant spaces, year by year, as the classes proceeded; and then the far longer train of ghosts that followed the Company, of the men that wore before us the college honors & the laurels of the state, the long winding train reaching back into eternity.</i><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I am moved every time I read that, just as I am when I pause at <a href="https://harvardplanning.emuseum.com/objects/104627/detail-view-of-johnston-gate-new-englands-first-fruits-plaqu" style="color: #954f72;">Johnston Gate</a> to be reminded what the settlers thought they were doing by founding Harvard College itself.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">(I posted a <a href="https://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2021/12/parents-and-preregistration.html">related followup</a> the next day.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-71311864532582850262021-08-30T09:44:00.000-07:002021-08-30T09:44:06.929-07:00Blown to Bits -- Second Edition now available for free download!<p> <i style="font-weight: bold;">Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion </i>is now available in its second edition! This is the book about the the social consequences of the explosion in digital information that was first published in 2008. For the second edition, the original authors, myself, Hal Abelson, and Ken Ledeen, have been joined by Wendy Seltzer. The book has been out in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Liberty-Happiness-Explosion-dp-0134850017/dp/0134850017/ref=dp_ob_title_bk">hard copy and Kindle</a> for several months, and we are now happy to make the digital version available for download under a Creative Commons license. I know several schools and colleges have used the first edition as the basis for discussions of legal and ethical issues in information technology and we are pleased to be able to make the new edition available on the same terms.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.bitsbook.com/thebook/">book's site</a> is under reconstruction, but if you click that link and go to the bottom of the page, there is a download link just above the Creative Commons copyright notice.</p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-78331846766868984532021-08-07T13:41:00.001-07:002021-08-07T14:00:32.749-07:00Learning as Service<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNusB5C3frRSiKhztwVPtyyj4gpb81PFb9uhI3zk6Uqry-ue5WnW2INwQctwm12Luj6f6UrD8SuY7Fm0NisdqycLpj25P69ilewcW9BTMP2N1q8BMlAMk7-5T3yTo5XlcJkNaqtdDnpPo/s1056/Keynote+photo.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="1056" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNusB5C3frRSiKhztwVPtyyj4gpb81PFb9uhI3zk6Uqry-ue5WnW2INwQctwm12Luj6f6UrD8SuY7Fm0NisdqycLpj25P69ilewcW9BTMP2N1q8BMlAMk7-5T3yTo5XlcJkNaqtdDnpPo/w640-h430/Keynote+photo.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p> This is the text of an address I gave (by Zoom) to a symposium on Service Learning organized by the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. Attendees were scattered all over the world and were affiliated with universities throughout Asia and beyond. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oEqJxaR5Yk">video recording of my talk is posted here</a>.</p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><b><i>Learning as Service<o:p></o:p></i></b></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in; text-align: center;">Harry Lewis<o:p></o:p></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in; text-align: center;">Address to PolyU HK Service Learning Program<o:p></o:p></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in; text-align: center;">July, 2021<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Good afternoon! I am so happy to be joining you today. I only wish I could be with you in person. I greatly miss the regular trips I used to take to Hong Kong and to the Chinese mainland, talking to people in the great universities I visited, including Hong Kong Poly. The hospitality was always wonderful, the food was always excellent. And more importantly, it made me feel part of the world’s academic society. When Grace invited me to give this address, we quickly found an unexpected way in which we are related academically—her PhD advisor was my undergraduate advisee. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">But even academics who share no family ties like that are related in ways that other professionals aren’t. When the Harvard students get their degrees at Commencement every spring, the president uses a phrase that always sticks in my mind. The new graduates are welcomed “to the ancient and universal company of scholars.” Nothing like that is said of medical doctors or lawyers. The universal company of scholars. It is global and it is timeless. You are part of that universal company too. And the main purpose of my address today is to talk to you about what that means.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now we are here together, only virtually alas, because you are part of a special branch of that company. You are engaged in service learning. What does that mean? It means you—and I am going to address my remarks to the teachers and scholars among you, though my message is for the students too—you service learning faculty are expanding education by teaching your students how to learn by helping other people, by being of service to them. You are teaching your students how to learn what it <b>means</b> to learn while being of service to others. You and your students are helping people help themselves, showing them how to electrify their houses or design their clothing or care for their elders. And your university includes this special kind of learning in the curriculum in the hope that your students will not just be of service to the people you are helping, but that they will develop the habit of helping others, that service will become part of what they take away from their university education. That they will keep doing it long after they earn their degrees. Your university hopes students will continue to be of service in the same way that it hopes graduates will engage in critical thinking, rational analysis, and persuasive argumentation long after they have stopped using those skills in their university courses, where of course their use is expected. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now I am a Harvard man through and through. I have never left the place really since I was 17 years old, except for a couple of years when I was in national service. I love the place. It has its problems and its history is far from flawless, and I have written about those things. But it’s a wonderful place and it’s given a lot to the world. One of those things, it turns out, is the idea of organized national service of a kind that was not military service. That was first laid out in a 1906 address by William James. James was a Harvard philosophy professor who is generally regarded as one of the founders of the science of psychology. He gave that address at Stanford University, and it was called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” There is a lot wrong with that speech, as we read it more than a hundred years later. James was a pacifist, and among the spectacularly incorrect things in his speech was his belief that war was coming to an end. He thought that men might not have enough worthy things to do in a world of perpetual peace. As it was, World War I started only 5 years later, and that was hardly the last war either, so that premise was badly wrong. In any case, James thought there should be some activity in which the youth of the world could more morally invest the energy and pride that had up to then been invested exclusively in warfare. Here is what he proposed (and I am quoting from him directly):<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. … But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of <i>nothing else</i> but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have <i>no</i> vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this … life at all, -- <i>this</i> is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. … If now -- and this is my idea -- there were … [an] army enlisted against <i>Nature</i>, the injustice would tend to be evened out … <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Let me just interject here that the idea of a “war against nature” sounds pretty jarring in this time of environmental degradation and climate change, when we are much more interested in protecting nature than conquering it. But what James meant was the notion that misery was the natural and permanent state of humankind, that is what he wanted to go to war against. He goes on:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">[T]he luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">End if quote. It was in universities where this idea was picked up and developed over the past century and more. You are part of that tradition, and you are today at work instilling “healthier sympathies and soberer ideas” in your students.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">So service learning is different from classroom learning. Service learning happens out in the field, in direct contact with the people you are trying to help. The other kind of learning happens in classrooms and laboratories. Though of course what I am calling classroom learning also happens in the occasional academic bubble in the field, at an arctic research station or an archaeological dig. But those are really just university classrooms located somewhere other than the main campus. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Of course there is more to service learning it than where it happens. Service learning is about students helping other people. And that means that regular classroom learning must be the opposite somehow. So if service learning is about students helping others, then classroom learning is about … what? Students helping <b>themselves</b>?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Well, that is certainly the way we often think about it. The US government puts out charts. With titles like “Education pays,” showing how much more money educated people will make in a lifetime depending on how many years of higher education they have. There is certainly a big economic advantage to getting an education. So people get an education out of economic self-interest. And societies invest in higher education in part because the economic self-interest of individuals adds up to create social upward mobility for whole populations. An economically progressive society needs an educated population. For example, the world needs more wordsmiths and code-smiths than ironsmiths today.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">This is all true, and yet there is something quite wrong about the picture of a university education as a sort of fusion of two different halves, classroom learning and service learning. Education is not some kind of bimetal strip, one side devoted to an obligation to help other people and the other side devoted to helping ourselves. Now that’s a terrible analogy, but it is actually interesting to think about. When heated, a bimetal strip bends one way only. In the real world, the incentive for financial gain, or at least security, is likely to overwhelm the pull toward more charitable efforts. I am sure you have heard students say exactly this in so many words, I know I have: “That good works stuff, I’ll get back to that later. Right now I need to figure out how to make a good living, how to support a family. Once I’ve done that, I’ll have the time and resources to do some good in the world. But not yet.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now I want to be careful about ridiculing that sort of student. I certainly have known some who were not distinguished by their altruism when they were undergraduates but who have gone on to become major philanthropists later in life. Bill Gates, for example. When he wasn’t coding he was mostly playing poker, as far as I can recall, and now he really is saving lives at a global scale, and doing a remarkable job at it. But he’s an exception. For most students, the habits and attitudes they learn as undergraduates stick with them, perhaps in some modified form, for the rest of their lives. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">And one of those bad habits you can get into at university (you the student, I mean) is to think on a short time scale. To try to optimize for the short run without regard to where you are going in the long run. To think you can remake yourself into a better person later on even if you don’t try to be a better person right now. In the same vein, I have heard students say that they intend to become more honest in the long run, once they are successful and financially secure, but right now they have to cheat to get ahead because everyone else is cheating. Somehow I don’t think they are going to become more honest later on if they are successful at cheating while they are young!<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Let me say a few more words about time scales. The great thing about service learning is that it gets students to confront the world’s ills as they really are. But success in opening students’ eyes to the present can, if we are not careful, blind them to the future. I have an anecdote to explain that—I am quoting here from a Carnegie Foundation report:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">A student volunteering at a soup kitchen . . . very much enjoyed the experience and felt that it had made him a better person. Without thinking through the implications of his statement, he said, “I hope it is still around when my children are in college, so they can work here too.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">There are various ways to describe what went wrong with this person. Put most simply, the student has been made to confront the plight of his fellow human beings, and to feel empathetic. But he has failed to understand that the point of the exercise was not <b>just</b> to develop his empathy and not <b>just</b> to respond in the moment, to the here and now. Service learning is part of this student’s education, but that education is not just about <b>him </b>and the way it makes him feel today. Somewhat more abstractly, one could say that this student hasn’t come to grips with the time scales on which various human interventions can operate. That the solution to the problem of hunger is not to build more soup kitchens, nor better ones, nor more permanent ones. But most importantly, I would say, the student has lost sight of his civic responsibilities as he has personalized his soup-kitchen experience. He has lost sight, or never understood, the opportunity he has as an educated person to make a larger difference in the world, in the longer run, through civic leadership and political action and support of education itself.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now I am sure you already knew that we should not let students think that their education is mostly about their personal success. It’s wrongheaded for lots of reasons, but to start with it’s setting them up for a midlife crisis some years in the future, when they have been successful and can’t figure out why they suddenly feel empty. How it came to pass that they have made a life that feels meaningless, lacking in purpose or even coherence. It is our obligation as educators to get our students to get into the habit of asking themselves why they are getting an education in the first place. That is key to having their education be the basis for a productive, satisfying, and meaningful life, no matter how successful we can help them make it for the short run. Of course we too are guilty of encouraging temporal myopia. We set up degree requirements as checklists, and students dutifully focus on getting the boxes all checked off. But even if we can impose enough rules and regulations on them that they never think about the why at all, and just think that their only job is to check the boxes unquestioningly, we can’t control what they will think of all that the day after they graduate, or a decade later. Then their doubts and misgivings are very likely to emerge too late for their education to help resolve them. While we have their attention, we have to give them a deeper sense of what education is about. So let’s turn to that.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">I want to start with something written about the reasons for getting an education way back in 1620, at the very dawn of the European Enlightenment, by Francis Bacon. In English it’s a bit antiquated in its diction, but except for that, every word of it could have been written yesterday. Here goes:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">Men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of the gift of reason to the benefit and use of man.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Yes, now just as then, those who love learning do it for fun, or to show off how smart and clever they are, and most often to make money at it. But seldom to give a true account of the gift of reason—that’s a phrase that’s invoked when Harvard presidents are inaugurated—“for the benefit and use of man.” All learning is learning for the benefit and use of humankind, in the short run or the long run. Our work as scholars and educators is in service of that mission.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">I sketched a caricature of a university education, an education which is partly or mainly about making the student more able to earn a living, bonded to a thin layer of education about helping other people. This caricature utterly misstates what education is about—which is giving a true account of the gift of reason, whatever that means. So let’s get concrete. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">An education, in fact the very idea of a university, is about two things, and they aren’t the self and others. Universities are about, on the one hand, preserving and transmitting the past, and on the other hand about creating the future, hopefully a future that is better than the present. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">On the one hand, there are products of civilization which, if let go for a generation, could completely disappear from the face of the earth. How to read hieroglyphics, for example—that was handed down for thousands of years in Egypt, and then there was a last generation that could read them, and then nothing for several thousand years more. The art was reconstructed with great effort a couple of centuries ago, but if someone were to shut down all the world’s Egyptology departments, wipe out every memory of what those hieroglyphs mean, then that knowledge would be lost again, perhaps forever this time. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">There are those in the US who think that the idea of human freedom and the rule of law are similarly imperiled institutions—that we will forget that the law is, as the Harvard president says when conferring degrees on graduates of the Law School, “wise restraints that make us free.” Universities are the places where our history, our culture, our wisdom such as we possess it, are carried forward. The fact is that many aspects of human culture, many parts of human memory, are hanging by a thread with <b>us</b>. And if <b>we</b> don’t carry that memory forward it will be lost. That is why we teach.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">But universities are also in the futures business. I mean the inventions and discoveries and new knowledge we create to make the future better than the past and the present. We are in the business of creating human progress. That is why research goes hand in hand with teaching in universities. They are two vectors pointed in the same direction. We professors are at the head of one arrow and the tail of the other.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">It is my own view that in American universities, for various reasons, the teaching role has become unhappily subordinated to the research role. The creation of the future is what earns the big rewards, especially in departments of science and engineering. The past seems not so important if you are convinced that your main job is to make a better future. But “The past is never dead,” as the great American novelist William Faulkner wrote; “It's not even past.” You can’t understand your own future if you don’t understand our collective past.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Hong Kong universities are based on an amalgam of British and American systems, but this duality is best understood in American terms. From the very beginning, American universities served these dual purposes of preserving civilization -- receiving it and passing it on -- and creating the future, through scholarship and research. Here are words about the founding of Harvard College from “New England’s First Fruits”, published in 1643, just seven years after the founding of Harvard, the oldest of the American universities. These words are inscribed on a tablet mounted just inside the main gate to Harvard Yard; do pause and read them if you have the good fortune to visit us in Cambridge. Here is how those settlers described the reason for founding Harvard. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">AFTER GOD HAD carried us safe to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and led the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now that is a remarkable passage. First of all, it suggests that it was rather an obvious thing to start a college; it was just something you had to do when you settled a wilderness, after building your houses, churches, and basic structures of survival and government. Then there are the dual purposes of advancing learning and perpetuating it, that is, advancing and preserving knowledge, looking forward and looking back. And then there is the explicit vocational education note. The college was not built to be an ivory tower where scholars could talk to each other. It was built because there were no guarantees that any more ships would be arriving from England with replacement ministers on board. The colonists were on their own, and they needed to create an institution that would serve their needs. It might be a mistake to credit those devout and Godfearing Puritans with much respect for the gift of reason, as they set up camp in the New England wilderness only a few years after Bacon had written the lines I quoted. But the Puritans certainly understood that learning was “for the benefit and use of man.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">That was all very different from the way Oxford and Cambridge saw themselves, and that is why Harvard, to this day, is organized as a corporation with lay governors, not professors that is, in ultimate control of the place. The lay boards still represent the public interest. The professors later got academic freedom, but not the right to run the place. Virtually every American university followed something like this model, with the public interest at the top of the organization chart. That students should be expected to be of service, in one way or another, is very natural in this structure. In fact, while Harvard’s motto is just the Latin word for Truth, Princeton’s is “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">To this day many faculty tend not to understand their obligation to society, and the basis for the tax exemptions American universities receive, and so on. Their confusion is the result of a persistent misunderstanding that American universities are modeled on our British forebears, which really were self-organized aggregates of professors. The historian Bernard Bailyn wrote a wonderful piece about this years ago, in which he quoted from a letter Bertrand Russell wrote after visiting the University of Wisconsin in the early years of the 20th century. “Whenever some farmer’s turnips go wrong,” Russell wrote, “they send a professor to investigate the failure scientifically.” He was bewildered that in a place so sensitive to taxpayers’ needs, they would want to pay him to lecture on the foundations of mathematics. He did not understand that the American university always has been about both cultural and intellectual inheritance and about creating the future. And about solving the problems the local farmers were having with their crops as well as delving into the absolute truths of pure mathematics.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now the relative indifference to education in many great universities, by comparison to research, happened because teaching is fundamentally a preservationist activity, and research is a futurist activity. And the resulting general lack of educational coherence results from the lack of any serious commitment to the famous aphorism of Harvard’s George Santayana: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is as though we think understanding the present suffices for the future, since, after all, everything that can <b>change</b> the future is already baked into the state of the world as it is today. If you think the future can be predicted from the present, why would you need to understand the past? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now finally I can get to my main point. You who are active in service learning are doing important work, not just for your students and for the communities they are serving, but for the world at large. And yet, you are not alone among teachers and scholars in that regard. <b>All</b> learning is a form of service. Teachers, researchers, and scholars are preserving civilization and trying to improve it, one student and one academic work at a time. Students are not just making a better life for themselves; they are reflecting on the fate of humanity, why life is worth living at all, and how they can contribute to the lives of others. In service learning you are making sure that students confront the present, the actual lives of actual human beings, as they actually are. And that is important. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">But sometimes consolidating the past, confronting the present, and imagining a better future require solitude, rather than human interactions. In fact, I think that our extreme degree of technological connectedness works against our efforts to get students to think deeply about themselves and their place in the world. It is hard, for example, to explore your identity by reading a novel and imagining what it would be like to be a different kind of person, to think their thoughts and have their ambitions and experience their loves, if your cell phone is bing-ing every ten seconds with urgent messages from Sam and Josie and Mary. Sometimes you need to get away from the present to imagine the future.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><b>Every</b> scholar is a service professional. We are all in our roles in service of civilization itself, its preservation, perpetuation, and improvement. It is a privilege to be in this role, though there are surely days when it feels like a form of personal sacrifice that our society does not value enough, or even disparages. I know this well in the US, where expertise has in the past few years been an object of suspicion and resentment. But each of us who is involved in conveying the truth to our intellectual heirs and adding new knowledge to the storehouse, even microscopically, experiences a feeling of intrinsic worth that those cannot experience who make money one day and lose it the next. And the thing about knowledge, unlike money, is that it comes in infinite variety, and can’t easily be quantified. A contribution to knowledge may look small today, or beautiful but completely useless. But a generation from now it may be the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the key needed to unlock some mystery. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">It has happened over and over again. The basic research that made it possible to quickly produce MRNA vaccines started a decade ago with no such concrete objective. Or to take an example from my own field, the mathematician G. H. Hardy proudly declared that number theory was useless; the reason he was proud of that was that he thought that meant it could, in particular, never find military application. Go forward a couple generations and all of computer security is built on some of those beautiful phenomena about the properties of whole numbers. We don’t know what we’ve got when we get it, another generation has to come along to make our meager contributions to human knowledge into something really important. We have to take joy in learning for its own sake, not because we think it will never be useful; we don’t know. But the whole mountain of knowledge to which we are contributing our grains of sand will, we believe, serve humanity well in the long run. We strain to preserve civilization because we see ourselves as part of a great chain of learning. The playwright Tom Stoppard described that chain in his play <i>Arcadia. </i>One character is trying to reassure another that nothing that has happened or been thought is <b>ever</b> lost. “We shed as we pick up,” says the character, “like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up, piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” That Stoppard vision is all true, but only if we all do our part.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">And don’t forget that beautiful things of no immediate practical application, poems and artworks and musical compositions, are useful too, if they inspire others or help them understand their place in the world. Even when no one cares about our work, or when it meets resistance and hostility and we are afraid to pursue it, we follow beauty and truth because that pursuit is a service to posterity, and we are in it for the long run. As Francis Bacon also wrote, “Truth is the daughter, not of authority, but time.” It takes patience and confidence to know that truth will win out, if we do our part to develop and defend it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Students too, are part of the future, and every teacher is a service professional too. You are performing a service to them though your mentorship, your demands, your kindness. It is hard to remember on a day to day basis, when you have too many papers to mark, and your students are making too many petty complaints and requests. But after more than 45 years of teaching, I am far less impressed by what I did for my most famous students than by what the ones I don’t even remember tell me that I did for them. And also what other students say <b>their</b> professors did that they have never forgotten for all the wrong reasons. I once met a middle-aged gay couple at an event, and apparently one of them had taken my introductory CS theory course when he was an undergraduate. He wanted me to know that when I went off my lesson plan (and I certainly did that a lot!) and told the tragic story of the life and death of Alan Turing, the forefather of computer science, <b>that</b> was the first time he felt at home at Harvard. And on the other hand, I once took a very successful graduate to lunch and across the room I noticed a faculty colleague she probably would have known. I offered to take her over to say hello, and she quickly declined. “That last time I saw him was to ask for a recommendation to graduate school,” she said. “He told me that if he wrote one, it wouldn’t be worth the postage it would take to mail it.” She never forgot that petty slight, almost fifty years later. Our small words matter, and like the words of ministers and priests, small comments can be influential and unforgettable. We can’t measure our worth in quantitative terms here either. All we can do is to be kind to our students, in confidence that our small kindnesses will propagate downstream.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Now I have just two more points to make. First, I have said that learning is a service profession, but what I have called classroom learning, both scholarship and the direct instruction of students, is different from other service vocations in one particular way. It is highly competitive. Professors compete to write the best books and to make the best scientific discoveries; universities compete to build the best laboratories and to attract the best scholars; students compete for admission to the best universities and to gain the top marks once they have matriculated. Nurses and clerics don’t compete like that; we expect them to be 100% altruistic all the time and never think about themselves.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">As in any marketplace, competition in universities improves quality, but it can distort the perspective of the individual participant. Because its goal is to improve society as a whole, education is not a zero-sum market; victory for one party today need not mean loss for another or for the future. That is why cheating is so disappointing in higher education, whether by students or by faculty; there is always more to learn, a student who is a little worse at one subject can be a little better at another, a professor can find many ways to be valuable to her students without being the best in her field. Service learning is generally a relief from the competitive aspects of academic life, an opportunity for students to see themselves in purely altruistic terms and not as conquerors of anything. This particular form of complementarity between classroom learning and service learning is healthy for students and faculty alike. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">But I must pause to note that this is not at all what William James had in mind. When he spoke of the moral equivalent of war, he really did mean that national service to improve the lot of the less fortunate would excite the same competitive, conquering spirit as military training did and still does. With a properly conceived service program, he thought (and here I quote him directly),<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life. I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, an until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">I really do wonder what you think about that. Is anything like that within your service learning experience, or in your imagination? (James really did think that, like military service, this form of national service would be just for men.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Finally, I’d like to strike a different note. Service learning is about developing human empathy and learning how to act on it. It is about our interconnections, and I began this talk by offering some collegiality with you all, as fellow members of the ancient and universal company of scholars. But I also put in a word for disconnection too, you will recall. That it is impossible for young persons to explore alternative identities and to discover their true self if they are constantly tied to the here and now, constantly recalibrating themselves against the expectations of their peers and authority figures. So I also want to put in a word for loneliness, for eccentricity, for feeling out of place. Maybe you, or your student, really are that one person trying to keep alive the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or any number of other unpopular or disparaged subjects other people think you really should not be studying. The mark of a great university and of a great society is that those lonely thinkers and students and scholars have a place within it. William James wrote another remarkable piece in 1903, less well known than “The Moral Equivalent of War.” It’s called “The True Harvard,” and it’s a paean to Harvard’s way of sheltering oddballs and freethinkers, but please hear it as a hopeful description of any great university. “The men I speak of,” he said, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">and for whom I speak to-day, are [Harvard’s] true missionaries and carry its gospel into infidel parts. When they come to Harvard, …. It is because they have heard of her persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice. It is because you cannot make single one-ideaed regiments of her classes. It is because she cherishes so many vital ideals, yet makes a scale of value among them. … The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons. Thoughts are the precious seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens. Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the world— either Carlyle or Emerson said that— for all things then have to rearrange themselves. But the thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed. Here they find the climate so propitious that they can be happy in their very solitude. The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">In my own teaching career, I have always hoped to live up to that standard, rather than seeing every nonconformist as a protruding nail to be hammered flat.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;">Thank you for listening to me today. I hope I have given you some things to think about. Being scholar or professor or teacher in a university can be lonely work, and frustrating as we combat the forces arrayed against us. Remember that the service you are providing to your students, to the pursuit of knowledge, and to posterity, is part of what you are doing in service learning, but also what you do in the classroom is in service of the same ultimate ends. In all aspects of your academic life, you are engaged in a single noble activity. All your teaching and all your scholarship is in service to the preservation and improvement of human civilization. You should be proud to be able to reconcile your ambitions with your disappointments in your daily work “for the benefit and use of man.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"> </span></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-1414355412699130202021-08-01T17:37:00.001-07:002021-08-01T17:37:33.632-07:00"Pregnant women"<p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I have nothing to say here about pregnant women. My title refers to the words “pregnant women,” a phrase not henceforth to be uttered in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. The permissible phrase is “pregnant people,” so as to include, for example, trans men carrying unborn babies. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">If you think I am writing parody or have launched on some outlandish extrapolation from a more plausible scenario, I am not. Harvard’s Dr. Carole Hooven was interviewed by <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/harvard-lecturer-blasted-by-colleague-for-defending-existence-of-biological-sex" style="color: #954f72;">Fox News</a>; the Daily Mail reprised that interview in <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9845639/Harvard-evolutionary-biology-prof-blasted-diversity-chief-dismissing-term-pregnant-people.html?ito=native_share_article-masthead" style="color: #954f72;">this report</a>, and the story was subsequently picked up by the NY Post. Hooven, Lecturer on Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, argued for retaining use of terms such as “male,” “female,” and “pregnant women” as having scientific meaning. An individual identifying herself as “Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force” in the same department tweeted some responses. That person seems to be a graduate student; as I have no doubt she is just doing her job in the role with which she introduces herself, I will identify her only as DDITF.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Here are a few direct quotations from the interview and responding tweets. Hooven had just published a book about (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Story-Testosterone-Hormone-Dominates-Divides-ebook/dp/B08HKX6GWH/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=hooven&qid=1627772877&sr=8-3" style="color: #954f72;">T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us</a>), which has gotten some <a href="https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/carole-hooven-on-testosterone" style="color: #954f72;">good press</a>. The lead-in was about resistance to using those old terms such as “male” and “female” in teaching biology.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Hooven: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">I've been feeling pretty frustrated over the last five years or so. It's been gradual. … This kind of ideology has been infiltrating science. It's infiltrating my classroom, to some extent. … Part of that science is teaching the facts. And the facts are that there are in fact two sexes - there are male and female - and those sexes are designated by the kind of gametes we produce. Do we make eggs, big sex cells, or little sex cells, sperm. And that's how we know whether someone is male or female. And the ideology seems to be that biology really isn't as important as how somebody feels about themselves, or feels their sex to be.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">… You know, we can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns. So understanding the facts about biology doesn't prevent us from treating people with respect.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">[It is wrong for professors and the media to] start backing away from using certain terms that they are afraid people will find offensive. And that fear is based in reality. People do find these terms offensive; they do complain on social media; they do shame people and even threaten to get people fired. So it's no wonder that a lot of people are caving and yielding to the social pressure But we are doing students and the public a great disservice, and dividing the populace.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">DDITF:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">As the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force for my dept @HarvardHEB, I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept in this interview with Fox and Friends.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;">Let’s be clear: if you respect diverse gender identities & aim to use correct pronouns, then you would know that people with diverse genders/sexes can be pregnant incl Trans men, intersex people & gender nonconforming people. That isn't too hard for medical students to understand. Inclusive language like “pregnant people” demonstrates respect for EVERYONE who has the ability to get pregnant, not just cis women. It is vital to teach med students gender inclusive language, as they will certainly interact with people that identify outside the gender binary. This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people within the med system.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">This back and forth seems so absurd that my first instinct is that these two people are simply talking past each other. That the now generally accepted notion of gender as something more complicated than biological sex is agreed to by both, but seen differently. And that while they may disagree about the risk-reward balance of using certain language, Dr. Hooven does not reject the notion of gender identity, and presumably the DDITF would not want (say) a trans woman to be scheduled for a hysterectomy to remove uterus she does not have, no matter how strongly that person identifies as female. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Such disputes about tone and category are the daily life of academia. As individual academics, both parties are entitled to their opinions. But the DDITF makes clear that she is <i>not speaking as an individual, </i>but as DDITF. What is dangerous is not an evolutionary biology faculty member saying that male and female are meaningful categories; it is someone speaking with institutional authority instructing her not to say so. Whatever one thinks about the gender binary and its discontents, no Harvard official should be telling a faculty member that that her defense of it is prohibited.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Of course no one is being harmed by Hooven’s vocabulary. What is harmful is to classify terms like “pregnant women” in the same category previously reserved for forced hormonal treatments, imprisonment for sodomy, and other legally sanctioned abuses of sexual minorities. It is the sort of thing that trivializes real harms where they continue to exist.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">It also infantilizes students to suggest that they should not be allowed to think independently about such matters, that there is only one right way to think, much less talk, about sex and gender. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I thought I had said <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-joyless-victory.html" style="color: #954f72;">my final word</a> on the absurd use of “inclusion and belonging” as Harvard’s pretext for attempting to shut down single-sex student clubs—a pretext which utterly collapsed when it became all that certain that both state and federal courts would find Harvard’s weird interpretation of “inclusion and belonging” to violate sex discrimination statutes. Some will <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/9/13/against-values-tests/" style="color: #954f72;">remember</a> that in one of Harvard’s earlier pretexts for the sanctions policy, it was justified on the basis that membership in a single sex club was evidence that the student did not share Harvard’s “deepest values”—pretty much the kind of extrapolation going on here, with the claim that use of the term “pregnant women” is transphobic. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But now is the moment to bring up an aspect of that earlier debate that has not received much attention. Some Harvard faculty and administrators backed the move against single-gender clubs on the basis that students not conforming to the gender binary would not feel they belonged in either kind of club. That male and female being fictional categories, allowing the existence of clubs restricted to one gender was transphobic on Harvard’s part. An appendix to one of the reports on the clubs presented this argument; it was suppressed when other parts of the report became public. (At the risk of confusing matters further, I am adopting Harvard’s language, which always referred to “single-gender social organizations” to refer to what are commonly known as single-sex clubs. I have no idea how those clubs themselves think about the difference between sex and gender.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I have never met Dr. Hooven, and had never heard of her until today. Before this controversy, she was already a brave woman for engaging in serious research on the sensitive subject of sex hormones and what they do to us. I hope she sticks to her guns. She is in a vulnerable position; lecturers are reappointed annually, and she serves as co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in her department, which means that (a) her department must think she is good with undergraduates and (b) if the students turn on her, she could be in trouble. (I am reminded of the estimable Sharon Howell, like Hooven a Harvard lecturer with significant administrative responsibilities for undergraduate affairs, who a few years ago <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/03/sharon-howells-magnificent-letter.html" style="color: #954f72;">spoke truth to power</a> and nonetheless went on to a fine professional career.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">As for the DDITF, as a PhD candidate, she may well be inexperienced in the chess game of academic debate. Perhaps she has already taken a lesson. But perhaps not. There is a large bureaucracy of diversity officers staffing the university under various titles. (My home base, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is probably typical; we have an Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.) The mission of these offices, broadly stated, is to increase diversity and to make sure everyone feels welcome. The serious question the Hooven incident raises is whether Harvard sees that mission to include policing language and thought, as the DDITF of Human Evolutionary Biology plainly thought it her job to do. What instructions do these officials receive about where to draw the line between letting language pass, privately inquiring of a faculty member, or launching a public attack? Does Harvard have an <i>index verborum prohibitorum </i>to which diversity officials refer<i>, </i>and what’s on it?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I would like to know the answer. And my concern is not only theoretical. I am scheduled to teach my “Classics of Computer Science” course next year, and one of the most important papers we read, Fred Brooks’s “The Mythical Man Month” (chapter 40 of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp/0262045303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lewis+ideas+that+created+the+future&qid=1595538528&s=books&sr=1-1" style="color: #954f72;">Ideas that Created the Future</a>), </i> uses childbearing as an example. I hope what is always a lively discussion of software engineering does not get sidetracked or worse … <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And I’d like to see <i>1984</i> restored as mandatory reading for Harvard students.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-57996558151744118762021-07-09T17:19:00.001-07:002021-07-09T17:19:25.392-07:00Book reviews, and a talk I gave "in" Hong Kong<p> A very nice <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3471469.3471473" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">review</a> Bill Gasarch b of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp/0262045303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lewis+ideas+that+created+the+future&qid=1595538528&s=books&sr=1-1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ideas that Created the Future</a></i> appears in SIGACT News, Volume 52, Issue 2, June 2021, pp. 10-17. (Most people in universities can access the review through their library systems.) In general I am pleased by the reception the book is getting, have had very few second thoughts about my selection of papers, and have found that readers with little interest in reading the original texts find my introductory essays quite entertaining and informative.</p><p><br /></p><p>I <a href="https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/06/derek-boks-higher-expectations-our-colleges-should-accomplish-more/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">reviewed</a> Derek Bok's latest book, <i>Higher Expectations, </i> for the James G. Martin Center.</p><p><br /></p><p>And I keynoted a quite impressive <a href="https://www.polyu.edu.hk/osl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=174&Itemid=349" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">symposium</a> on service learning organized by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I used to visit Hong Kong regularly and was pleased by the invitation to return, virtually, to address an international audience by Zoom. The full text of my talk is included below. "Grace" refers to my host, Prof. Grace Ngai, who heads PolyU's service learning program and kindly hosted the event.</p><p><br /></p><p>----------------------</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Learning as Service</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Good afternoon! I am so happy to be joining you today. I only wish I could be with you in person. I greatly miss the regular trips I used to take to Hong Kong and to the Chinese mainland, talking to people in the great universities I visited, including Hong Kong Poly. The hospitality was always wonderful, the food was always excellent. And more importantly, it made me feel part of the world’s academic society. When Grace invited me to give this address, we quickly found an unexpected way in which we are related academically—her PhD advisor was my undergraduate advisee. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But even academics who share no family ties like that are related in ways that other professionals aren’t. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">When the Harvard students get their degrees at Commencement every spring, the president stands at the front of an enormous outdoor gathering, with the graduates sitting up front and their families filling the rest of Harvard Yard. At the crucial moment, the president uses a phrase that always sticks in my mind. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">He welcomes the new graduates “to the ancient and universal company of scholars.” Nothing like that is said of medical doctors or lawyers. The universal company of scholars. It is global and it is timeless. You are part of that universal company too. And the main purpose of my address today is to talk to you about what that means.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now we are here together, only virtually alas, because you are part of a special branch of that company. You are engaged in service learning. What does that mean? It means you—and I am going to address my remarks to the teachers and scholars among you, though my message is for the students too—you service learning faculty are expanding education by teaching your students how to learn by helping other people, by being of service to them. You are teaching your students how to learn what it means to learn while being of service to others. You and your students are helping people help themselves, showing them how to electrify their houses or design their clothing or care for their elders. And your university includes this special kind of learning in the curriculum in the hope that your students will not just be of service to the people you are helping, but that they will develop the habit of helping others, that service will become part of what they take away from their university education. That they will keep doing it long after they earn their degrees. Your university hopes students will continue to be of service in the same way that it hopes graduates will engage in critical thinking, rational analysis, and persuasive argumentation long after they have stopped using those skills in their university courses, where of course their use is expected. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now I am a Harvard man through and through. I have never left the place really since I was 17 years old, except for a couple of years when I was in national service. I love the place. It has its problems and its history is far from flawless, and I have written about those things. But it’s a wonderful place and it’s given a lot to the world. One of those things, it turns out, is the idea of organized national service of a kind that was not military service.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">That was first laid out in a 1906 address by William James. James was a Harvard philosophy professor who is generally regarded as one of the founders of the science of psychology. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">He gave that address at Stanford University, and it was called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” There is a lot wrong with that speech, as we read it more than a hundred years later. James was a pacifist, and among the spectacularly incorrect things in his speech was his belief that war was coming to an end. He thought that men might not have enough worthy things to do in a world of perpetual peace. As it was, World War I started only 5 years later, and that was hardly the last war either, so that premise was badly wrong. In any case, James thought there should be some activity in which the youth of the world could more morally invest the energy and pride that, as he saw it, had up to then been invested exclusively in warfare. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Here is what he proposed (and I am quoting from him directly):<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. … But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this … life at all, -- this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. … If now -- and this is my idea -- there were … [an] army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out … </p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Let me just interject here that the idea of a “war against nature” sounds pretty jarring in this time of environmental degradation and climate change, when we are much more interested in protecting nature than conquering it. But what James meant was the notion that misery was the natural and permanent state of humankind, that is what he wanted to go to war. against. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">He goes on:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">[T]he luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. </p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">End of quote. It was in universities where this idea was picked up and developed over the past century and more. You are part of that tradition, and you are today at work instilling “healthier sympathies and soberer ideas” in your students.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">So service learning is different from classroom learning. Service learning happens out in the field, in direct contact with the people you are trying to help. The other kind of learning happens in classrooms and laboratories. Though of course what I am calling classroom learning also happens in the occasional academic bubble in the field, at an arctic research station or an archaeological dig. But those are really just university classrooms located somewhere other than the main campus. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Of course there is more to service learning it than where it happens. Service learning is about students helping other people. And that means that regular classroom learning must be the opposite somehow. So if service learning is about students helping others, then classroom learning is about … what? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Students helping themselves?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Well, that is certainly the way we often think about it. The US government puts out charts. With titles like “Education pays,” showing how much more money educated people will make in a lifetime depending on how many years of higher education they have. There is certainly a big economic advantage to getting an education. So people get an education out of economic self-interest. And societies invest in higher education in part because the economic self-interest of individuals adds up to create social upward mobility for whole populations. An economically progressive society needs an educated population. For example, the world needs more wordsmiths and code-smiths than ironsmiths today.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">This is all true, and yet there is something quite wrong about the picture of a university education as a sort of fusion of two different halves, classroom learning and service learning. Education is not some kind of bimetal strip, one side devoted to an obligation to help other people and the other side devoted to helping ourselves. Now that’s a terrible analogy, but it is actually interesting to think about. When heated, a bimetal strip bends one way only. In the real world, the incentive for financial gain, or at least security, is likely to overwhelm the pull toward more charitable efforts. I am sure you have heard students say exactly this in so many words, I know I have: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">“That good works stuff, I’ll get back to that later. Right now I need to figure out how to make a good living, how to support a family. Once I’ve done that, I’ll have the time and resources to do some good in the world. But not yet.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now I want to be careful about ridiculing that sort of student. I certainly have known some who were not distinguished by their altruism when they were undergraduates but who have gone on to become major philanthropists later in life. Bill Gates, for example. When he wasn’t coding he was mostly playing poker, as far as I can recall, and now he really is saving lives at a global scale, and doing a remarkable job at it. But he’s an exception. For most students, the habits and attitudes they learn as undergraduates stick with them, perhaps in some modified form, for the rest of their lives. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And one of those bad habits you can get into at university (you the student, I mean) is to think on a short time scale. To try to optimize for the short run without regard to where you are going in the long run. To think you can remake yourself into a better person later on even if you don’t try to be a better person right now. In the same vein, I have heard students say that they intend to become more honest in the long run, once they are successful and financially secure, but right now they have to cheat to get ahead because everyone else is cheating. Somehow I don’t think they are going to become more honest later on if they are successful at cheating while they are young!<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Let me say a few more words about time scales. The great thing about service learning is that it gets students to confront the world’s ills as they really are. But success in opening students’ eyes to the present can, if we are not careful, blind them to the future. I have an anecdote to explain that—I am quoting here from a Carnegie Foundation report:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">A student volunteering at a soup kitchen . . . very much enjoyed the experience and felt that it had made him a better person. Without thinking through the implications of his statement, he said, “I hope it is still around when my children are in college, so they can work here too.” </p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">There are various ways to describe what went wrong with this person. Put most simply, the student has been made to confront the plight of his fellow human beings, and to feel empathetic. But he has failed to understand that the point of the exercise was not just to develop his empathy and not just to respond in the moment, to the here and now. Service learning is part of this student’s education, but that education is not just about him and the way it makes him feel today. Somewhat more abstractly, one could say that this student hasn’t come to grips with the time scales on which various human interventions can operate. That the solution to the problem of hunger is not to build more soup kitchens, nor better ones, nor more permanent ones. But most importantly, I would say, the student has lost sight of his civic responsibilities as he has personalized his soup-kitchen experience. He has lost sight of, or never understood, the opportunity he has as an educated person to make a larger difference in the world, in the longer run, through civic leadership and political action and support of education itself. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now I am sure you already knew that we should not let students think that their education is mostly about their personal success. It’s wrongheaded for lots of reasons, but to start with, it’s setting them up for a midlife crisis some years in the future, when they have become successful and can’t figure out why they suddenly feel empty. How it came to pass that they have made a life that feels meaningless, lacking in purpose or even coherence. It is our obligation as educators to get our students to get into the habit of asking themselves why they are getting an education in the first place. That is key to having their education be the basis for a productive, satisfying, and meaningful life, no matter how successful we can help them make it for the short run. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Of course, we too are guilty of encouraging temporal myopia. We set up degree requirements as incoherent checklists, and students dutifully focus on getting the boxes all checked off. But even if we can impose enough rules and regulations on them that they never think about the why at all, and just think that their only job is to check the boxes unquestioningly, we can’t control what they will think of all that the day after they graduate, or a decade later. Then their doubts and misgivings are very likely to emerge, too late for their education to help resolve them. While we have their attention, we have to give them a deeper sense of what education is about. So let’s turn to that.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I want to start with something written about the reasons for getting an education way back in 1620, at the very dawn of the European Enlightenment, by Francis Bacon. In English it’s a bit antiquated in its diction, but except for that, every word of it could have been written yesterday. Here goes:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">Men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of the gift of reason to the benefit and use of man.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Yes, now just as then, those who love learning do it for fun, or to show off how smart and clever they are, and most often to make money at it. But seldom to give a true account of the gift of reason—that’s a phrase that’s invoked when Harvard presidents are inaugurated—“for the benefit and use of man.” All learning is learning for the benefit and use of humankind, in the short run or the long run. Our work as scholars and educators is in service of that mission.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I sketched a caricature of a university education, an education which is partly or mainly about making the student more able to earn a living, bonded to a thin layer of education about helping other people. This caricature utterly misstates what education is about—which is giving a true account of the gift of reason, whatever that means. So let’s get concrete. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">An education, in fact the very idea of a university, is about two things, and they aren’t the self and others. Universities are about, on the one hand, preserving and transmitting the past, and on the other hand about creating the future, hopefully a future that is better than the present. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">On the one hand, there are products of civilization which, if let go for a generation, could completely disappear from the face of the earth. How to read hieroglyphics, for example—that was handed down for thousands of years in Egypt, and then there was a last generation that could read them, and then nothing for several thousand years more. The art was reconstructed with great effort a couple of centuries ago, but if someone were to shut down all the world’s Egyptology departments, wipe out every memory of what those hieroglyphs mean, then that knowledge would be lost again, perhaps forever this time. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">There are those in the US who think that the idea of human freedom and the rule of law are similarly imperiled institutions—that we will forget that the law is, as the Harvard president says when conferring degrees on graduates of the Law School, “wise restraints that make us free.” Universities are the places where our history, our culture, our wisdom such as we possess it, are carried forward. The fact is that many aspects of human culture, many parts of human memory, are hanging by a thread with us. And if we don’t carry that memory forward it will be lost. That is why we teach.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But universities are also in the futures business. I mean the inventions and discoveries and new knowledge we create to make the future better than the past and the present. We are in the business of creating human progress. That is why research goes hand in hand with teaching in universities. They are two vectors pointed in the same direction. We professors are at the head of one arrow and the tail of the other.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">It is my own view that in American universities, for various reasons, the teaching role has become unhappily subordinated to the research role. The creation of the future is what earns the big rewards, especially in departments of science and engineering. The past seems not so important if you are convinced that your main job is to make a better future. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But “The past is never dead,” as the great American novelist William Faulkner wrote; “It's not even past.” You can’t understand your own future if you don’t understand our collective past. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Hong Kong universities are based on an amalgam of British and American systems, but this duality, between the past and the future, is best understood in American terms. From the very beginning, American universities served these dual purposes of preserving civilization -- receiving it and passing it on -- and creating the future, through scholarship and research. Here are words about the founding of Harvard College from “New England’s First Fruits”, published in 1643, just seven years after the founding of Harvard, the oldest of the American universities. These words are inscribed on a tablet mounted just inside the main gate to Harvard Yard, as I show here; do pause and read them if you have the good fortune to visit us in Cambridge. Here is how those settlers described their reasons for founding Harvard. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">AFTER GOD HAD carried us safe to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and led the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. </p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now that is a remarkable passage. First of all, it suggests that it was rather an obvious thing to start a college; it was just something you had to do when you settled a wilderness, after building your houses, churches, and basic structures of survival and government. Then there are the dual purposes of Advancing learning and perpetuating it, that is, advancing and preserving knowledge, looking forward and looking back. And then there is the explicit vocational education note. The college was not built to be an ivory tower where scholars could talk to each other. It was built because there were no guarantees that any more ships would be arriving from England with replacement ministers on board. The colonists were on their own, and they needed to create an institution that would serve their needs. It would be a mistake to credit those devout and Godfearing Puritans with much respect for the gift of reason, as they set up camp in the New England wilderness only a few years after Bacon had written the lines I quoted. But the Puritans certainly understood that learning was “for the benefit and use of man.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">That was all very different from the way Oxford and Cambridge saw themselves. Oxford, for example, is actually run by academics, because it started as a self-organized group of scholars. But Harvard was started by ordinary people, not academics. That is why Harvard, to this day, is organized as a corporation with lay governors, not professors that is, in ultimate control of the place. The lay boards still represent the public interest. The professors later got academic freedom, but not the right to run the place. Virtually every American university followed something like this model, with the public interest at the top of the organization chart. That students should be expected to be of service, in one way or another, is very natural in this structure. In fact, some great American universities write that into their mottos. For example, while Harvard’s motto is just the Latin word for Truth, Princeton’s is “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">To this day many faculty tend not to understand their obligation to society, and the basis for the tax exemptions American universities receive, and so on. Their confusion is the result of a persistent misunderstanding that American universities are modeled on our British forebears, which really were self-organized aggregates of professors. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The historian Bernard Bailyn wrote a wonderful piece about this years ago, in which he quoted from a letter Bertrand Russell wrote after visiting the University of Wisconsin in the early years of the 20th century. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">“Whenever some farmer’s turnips go wrong,” Russell wrote, “they send a professor to investigate the failure scientifically.” He was bewildered that in a place so sensitive to taxpayers’ needs, they would want to pay him to lecture on the foundations of mathematics. He did not understand that the American university always has been about both cultural and intellectual inheritance and about creating the future. And about solving the problems the local farmers were having with their crops as well as delving into the absolute truths of pure mathematics.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now the relative indifference to education in many great universities, by comparison to research, happened because teaching is fundamentally a preservationist activity, and research is a futurist activity. And the resulting general lack of educational coherence results from the lack of any serious commitment to the famous aphorism of Harvard’s George Santayana:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is as though we think understanding the present suffices for the future, since, after all, everything that can change the future is already baked into the state of the world as it is today. If you think the future can be predicted from the present, why would you need to understand the past? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now finally I can get to my main point. You who are active in service learning are doing important work, not just for your students and for the communities they are serving, but for the world at large. And yet, you are not alone among teachers and scholars in that regard. All learning is a form of service. Teachers, researchers, and scholars are preserving civilization and trying to improve it, one student and one academic work at a time. Students are not just making a better life for themselves; they are reflecting on the fate of humanity, why life is worth living at all, and how they can contribute to the lives of others. In service learning you are making sure that students confront the present, the actual lives of actual human beings, as they actually are. And that is important. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But sometimes consolidating the past, confronting the present, and imagining a better future require solitude, rather than human interactions. In fact, I think that our extreme degree of technological connectedness works against our efforts to get students to think deeply about themselves and their place in the world. It is hard, for example, to explore your identity by reading a novel and imagining what it would be like to be a different kind of person, to think their thoughts and have their ambitions and experience their loves, if your cell phone is bing-ing every ten seconds with urgent messages from Sam and Josie and Mary. Sometimes you need to get away from the present to imagine the future.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Every scholar is a service professional. We are all in our roles in service of civilization itself, its preservation, perpetuation, and improvement. It is a privilege to be in this role, though there are surely days when it feels like a form of personal sacrifice that our society does not value enough, or even disparages. I know this well in the US, where expertise has in the past few years been an object of suspicion and resentment. But each of us who is involved in conveying the truth to our intellectual heirs and adding new knowledge to the storehouse, even microscopically, experiences a feeling of intrinsic worth that those cannot experience who make money one day and lose it the next. And the thing about knowledge, unlike money, is that it comes in infinite variety, and can’t easily be quantified. A contribution to knowledge may look small today, or beautiful but completely useless. But a generation from now it may be the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the key needed to unlock some mystery. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">It has happened over and over again. The basic research that made it possible to quickly produce MRNA vaccines started a decade ago with no such concrete objective. Or to take an example from my own field, the mathematician G. H. Hardy proudly declared that number theory was useless; the reason he was proud of that was that he thought that meant it could, in particular, never find military application. Go forward a couple generations and all of computer security is built on some of those beautiful phenomena about the properties of whole numbers. We don’t know what we’ve got when we get it, another generation has to come along to make our meager contributions to human knowledge into something really important. We have to take joy in learning for its own sake, not because we think it will never be useful; we don’t know. But the whole mountain of knowledge to which we are contributing our grains of sand will, we believe, serve humanity well in the long run. We strain to preserve civilization because we see ourselves as part of a great chain of learning. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">The playwright Tom Stoppard described that chain in his play Arcadia. One character is trying to reassure another that nothing that has happened or been thought is ever lost. “We shed as we pick up,” says the character, “like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up, piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” That Stoppard vision is all true, but only if we all do our part.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And don’t forget that beautiful things of no immediate practical application, poems and artworks and musical compositions, are useful too, if they inspire others or help them understand their place in the world. Even when no one cares about our work, or when it meets resistance and hostility and we are afraid to pursue it, we follow beauty and truth because that pursuit is a service to posterity, and we are in it for the long run. As Francis Bacon also wrote, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">“Truth is the daughter, not of authority, but time.” It takes patience and confidence to know that truth will win out, if we do our part to develop and defend it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Students too, are part of the future, and every teacher is a service professional too. You are performing a service to them though your mentorship, your demands, your kindness. It is hard to remember on a day to day basis, when you have too many papers to mark, and your students are making too many petty complaints and requests. But after more than 45 years of teaching, I am far less impressed by what I did for my most famous students than by what the ones I don’t even remember tell me that I did for them. And also what other students say their professors did that they have never forgotten for all the wrong reasons. I once met a middle-aged gay couple at an event, and apparently one of them had taken my introductory CS theory course when he was an undergraduate. He wanted me to know that when I went off my lesson plan (and I certainly did that a lot!) and told the tragic story of the life and death of Alan Turing, the forefather of computer science, that was the first time he felt at home at Harvard. And on the other hand, I once took a very successful graduate to lunch and across the room I noticed a faculty colleague she probably would have known. I offered to take her over to say hello, and she quickly declined. “That last time I saw him was to ask for a recommendation to graduate school,” she said. “He told me that if he wrote one, it wouldn’t be worth the postage it would take to mail it.” She never forgot that petty slight, almost fifty years later. Our small words matter, and like the words of ministers and priests, small comments can be influential and unforgettable. We can’t measure our worth in quantitative terms here either. All we can do is to be kind to our students, in confidence that our small kindnesses will propagate downstream.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Now I have just two more points to make, and I am going to take us back to William James to make them. First, I have said that learning is a service profession, but what I have called classroom learning, both scholarship and the direct instruction of students, is different from other service vocations in one particular way. It is highly competitive. Professors compete to write the best books and to make the best scientific discoveries; universities compete to build the best laboratories and to attract the best scholars; students compete for admission to the best universities and to gain the top marks once they have matriculated. Nurses and clerics don’t compete like that; we expect them to be 100% altruistic all the time and never think about themselves.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">As in any marketplace, competition in universities improves quality. Biochemistry moves faster because every biochemistry professor wants to make the critical discovery before any other professor does. But it can distort the perspective of the individual participant. Because its goal is to improve society as a whole, education is not a zero-sum market; victory for one party today need not mean loss for another or for the future. That is why cheating is so disappointing in higher education, whether by students or by faculty; there is always more to learn, a student who is a little worse at one subject can be a little better at another, a professor can find many ways to be valuable to her students without being the best in her field. Service learning is generally a relief from the competitive aspects of academic life, an opportunity for students to see themselves in purely altruistic terms and not as conquerors of anything. This particular form of complementarity between classroom learning and service learning is healthy for students and faculty alike. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But I must pause to note that this is not at all what William James had in mind. When he spoke of the moral equivalent of war, he really did mean that national service to improve the lot of the less fortunate would excite the same competitive, conquering spirit as military training did and still does. With a properly conceived service program, he thought (and here I quote him directly),<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life. I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time … and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I really do wonder what you think about that. Is anything like that within your service learning experience, or in your imagination? (James really did think that, like military service, this form of national service would be just for men.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Finally, I’d like to strike a different note. Service learning is about developing human empathy and learning how to act on it. It is about our interconnections, and I began this talk by offering some collegiality with you all, as fellow members of the ancient and universal company of scholars. But I also put in a word for disconnection too, you will recall. That it is impossible for young persons to explore alternative identities and to discover their true selves if they are constantly tied to the here and now, constantly recalibrating themselves against the expectations of their peers and authority figures. So I also want to put in a word for loneliness, for eccentricity, for feeling out of place. Maybe you, or your student, really are that one person trying to keep alive the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or any number of other unpopular or disparaged subjects other people think you really should not be studying. The mark of a great university and of a great society is that those lonely thinkers and students and scholars have a place within it. William James wrote another remarkable piece in 1903, less well known than “The Moral Equivalent of War.” It’s called “The True Harvard,” and it’s a paean to Harvard’s way of sheltering oddballs and freethinkers, but please hear it as a hopeful description of any great university.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> “The men I speak of,” he said, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">and for whom I speak to-day, are [Harvard’s] true missionaries and carry its gospel into infidel parts. When they come to Harvard, …. It is because they have heard of her persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice. It is because you cannot make single one-ideaed regiments of her classes. It is because she cherishes so many vital ideals, yet makes a scale of value among them. … The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons. </p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in; text-align: left;">Thoughts are the precious seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens. Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the world— either Carlyle or Emerson said that— for all things then have to rearrange themselves. But the thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed. Here they find the climate so propitious that they can be happy in their very solitude. The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">In my own teaching career, I have always hoped to live up to that standard, rather than seeing every nonconformist as a protruding nail to be hammered flat. I hope I may be forgiven for thinking that my greatest contribution to the careers of the extraordinary students I have had, Gates and Zuckerberg and many now eminent scholars in university departments everywhere, was to stay out of their way and to indulge their rebellious inclinations.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> I'd like to thank Hong Kong Polytechnic University for the invitation to join you, and I'd like to thank you for listening to me today. I hope I have given you some things to think about. Being a scholar or professor or teacher in a university can be lonely work, and frustrating as we combat the forces arrayed against us. Remember that the service you are providing to your students, to the pursuit of knowledge, and to posterity, is part of what you are doing in service learning. But what you do in the classroom is in service of the same ultimate ends. In all aspects of your academic life, you are engaged in a single noble activity. All your teaching and all your scholarship is in service to the preservation and improvement of human civilization. You should be proud to be able to reconcile your ambitions with your disappointments in your daily work “for the benefit and use of man.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Thank you, and now let's move to a discussion!<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-91334719038448493232020-10-20T15:58:00.000-07:002020-10-20T15:58:49.772-07:00Forthcoming booksIn the next few months two longstanding projects of mine will come to fruition. With the jacket copy and pub dates in hand, I am letting you know about them!<div><br /></div><div><p align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">Coming from Pearson, December 3, 2020</p><p align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134850017?pf_rd_r=PYZY1E20VSD9K49KR314&pf_rd_p=edaba0ee-c2fe-4124-9f5d-b31d6b1bfbee" style="color: #627840; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" title="">Blown to Bits, Second Editio</a>n<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134850017?pf_rd_r=PYZY1E20VSD9K49KR314&pf_rd_p=edaba0ee-c2fe-4124-9f5d-b31d6b1bfbee" style="color: #627840; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;" title=""><img alt="Cover of Blown to Bits, 2nd edition" class="media-element file-default file-os-files-xxlarge" height="701.9837036132812" src="https://static.scholar.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xxlarge/public/harrylewis/files/b2b2_cover.jpg?m=1603204419&itok=mVsHTY-8" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%; padding-right: 15px;" title="" width="950.9918823242188" /></a></p><p align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">Coming from MIT Press, February 2, 2021!</p><p align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp/0262045303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lewis+ideas+that+created+the+future&qid=1595538528&s=books&sr=1-1" style="color: #627840; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" title="">Ideas That Created the Future</a></p><p align="center" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp/0262045303/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=lewis+ideas+that+created+the+future&qid=1595538528&s=books&sr=1-1" style="color: #627840; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;" title=""><img alt="Ideas That Created the Future cover" class="media-element file-default file-os-files-xxlarge" height="558.9810180664062" src="https://static.scholar.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xxlarge/public/harrylewis/files/itctf_cover.png?m=1603204682&itok=jMEPJVYc" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%; padding-right: 15px;" title="" width="921.997314453125" /></a></p></div><div><br /></div>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-17644333286036707452020-10-02T07:16:00.008-07:002020-12-30T09:05:34.585-08:00The True Harvard<p> Reading about some ongoing Harvard controversies, programs, and initiatives recently, I was reminded of this short talk William James gave on June 24, 1903, at the Commencement Dinner after receiving an honorary LL.D. degree. It was printed in <i>The Harvard Graduate's Magazine</i> [the ancestor of the current <i>Harvard Magazine</i>] for September, 1903. I think it should be better known; it sounds very fresh and relevant to me today.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">- O -</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>WHEN a man gets a decoration from a </span><span>foreign institution, he may take it as an honor. Coming as mine has come to-day, I prefer to take it for that far more valuable thing, a token of personal good will from friends. </span><span>Recognizing the good will and the friendliness, I am going to respond to the chairman’s call by speaking exactly as I feel. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>I am not an alumnus of the College. I </span><span>have not even a degree from the Scientific </span><span>School, in which I did some study forty years ago. I have no right to vote for Overseers, and I have never felt until to-day as if I were </span><span>a child of the house of Harvard in the fullest </span><span>sense. Harvard is many things in one—a school, a forcing house for thought, and also a social club; and the club aspect is so strong, the family tie so close and subtle among our Bachelors of Arts that all of us here who are </span><span>in my plight, no matter how long we may </span><span>have lived here, always feel a little like out siders on Commencement day. We have no class to walk with, and we often stay away </span><span>from the procession. It may be foolish, but </span><span>it is a fact. I don’t believe that my dear friends Shaler, Hollis, Lanman, or Royce ever have felt quite as happy or as much at home as my friend Barrett Wendell feels </span><span>up on a day like this. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>I wish to use my present privilege to say </span><span>a word for these outsiders with whom I belong. Many years ago there was one of them from Canada here— a man with a </span><span>high-pitched voice, who couldn’t fully agree with all the points of my philosophy. At a lecture one day, when I was in the full flood </span><span>of my eloquence, his voice rose above mine, </span><span>exclaiming: “But, doctor, doctor! to be serious for a moment . . . ,” in so sincere a tone that the whole room burst out laughing. </span><span>I want you now to be serious for a moment while I say my little say. We are glorifying ourselves to-day, and whenever the name of Harvard is emphatically uttered on such days, frantic cheers go up. There are days </span><span>for affection, when pure sentiment and loyalty </span><span>come rightly to the fore. But behind our </span><span>mere animal feeling for old schoolmates and the Yard and the bell, and Memorial and the clubs and the river and the Soldiers’ Field, there must be something deeper and more rational. There ought at any rate to be some </span><span>possible ground in reason for one’s boiling </span><span>over with joy that one is a son of Harvard, </span><span>and was not, by some unspeakably horrible accident of birth, predestined to graduate at Yale or at Cornell. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Any college can foster club loyalty of that </span><span>sort. The only rational ground for pre-emi</span><span>nent admiration of any single college would be its pre-eminent spiritual tone. But to be a </span><span>college man in the mere clubhouse sense — I </span><span>care not of what college — affords no guar</span><span>antee of real superiority in spiritual tone.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>The old notion that book learning can be a panacea for the vices of society lies pretty well shattered today. I say this in spite of </span><span>certain utterances of the President of this University to the teachers last year. That </span><span>sanguine-hearted man seemed then to think that if the schools would only do their duty better, social vice might cease. But vice will never cease. Every level of culture breeds its own peculiar brand of it as surely as one soil breeds sugar-cane, and another soil breeds cranberries. If we were asked that disagree </span><span>able question, “What are the bosom-vices </span><span>of the level of culture which our land and day have reached?” we should be forced, I think, to give the still more disagreeable answer that they are swindling and adroitness, and the indulgence of swindling and adroitness, and cant, and sympathy with cant — natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of </span><span>“success” in the mere outward sense of “get</span><span>ting there,” and getting there on as big a </span><span>scale as we can, which characterizes our </span><span>present generation. What was Reason given </span><span>to man for, some satirist has said, except to enable him to invent reasons for what he </span><span>wants to do. We might say the same of education. We see college graduates on every </span><span>side of every public question. Some of Tammany’s staunchest supporters are Harvard </span><span>men. Harvard men defend our treatment of </span><span>our Filipino allies as a masterpiece of policy and morals. Harvard men, as journalists, </span><span>pride themselves on producing copy for any </span><span>side that may enlist them. There is not a </span><span>public abuse for which some Harvard advo</span><span>cate may not be found. </span></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>In the successful sense, then, in the worldly sense, in the club sense, to be a college man, even a Harvard man, affords no sure guarantee for anything but a more educated cleverness in the service of popular idols and vulgar </span><span>ends. Is there no inner Harvard within the outer Harvard which means definitively more </span><span>than this— for which the outside men who </span><span>come here in such numbers, come? They </span><span>come from the remotest outskirts of our country, without introductions, without school affiliations; special students, scientific students, graduate students, poor students of the College, who make their living as they </span><span>go. They seldom or never darken the doors </span><span>of the Pudding or the Porcellian; they hover in the background on days when the crimson </span><span>color is most in evidence, but they nevertheless </span><span>are intoxicated and exultant with the nourishment they find here; and their loyalty is deeper and subtler and more a matter of the </span><span>inmost soul than the gregarious loyalty of the clubhouse pattern often is. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Indeed, there is such an inner spiritual Harvard; and the men I speak of, and for whom I speak to-day, are its true missionaries and carry its gospel into infidel parts. </span><span>When they come to Harvard, it is not pri</span><span>marily because she is a club. It is because they have heard of her persistently atomistic </span><span>constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality </span><span>and eccentricity, of her devotion to the prin</span><span>ciples of individual vocation and choice. It </span><span>is because you cannot make single one-ideaed </span><span>regiments of her classes. It is because she </span><span>cherishes so many vital ideals, yet makes a scale of value among them; so that even her </span><span>apparently incurable second-rateness (or only </span><span>occasional first-rateness) in intercollegiate athletics comes from her seeing so well that sport is but sport, that victory over Yale is not the whole of the law and the prophets, and that a </span><span>popgun is not the crack of doom. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons. Thoughts are the precious seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens. Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the world— either Carlyle or Emerson said that— for all things then have to rearrange themselves. But the thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. “Alone the great sun rises and alone spring the great streams.” The uni</span><span>versity most worthy of rational admiration </span><span>is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively </span><span>furthered, and most richly fed. On an occa</span><span>sion like this it would be poor taste to draw comparisons between the colleges, and in their mere clubhouse quality they cannot differ widely — all must be worthy of the </span><span>loyalties and affections they arouse. But as a nursery for independent and lonely thinkers </span><span>I do believe that Harvard still is in the van. Here they find the climate so propitious that they can be happy in their very solitude. The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her </span><span>children, will be that of her downfall. Our </span><span>undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let us agree together in hoping that the out</span><span>put of them will never cease. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-63134138492755014142020-08-14T14:03:00.001-07:002020-08-14T14:03:15.072-07:00Early days of computer science at Harvard<p>The group of students who hung around the Aiken Computation Lab +/-50 years ago got together last February, and I wrote up an account of our collective memory for <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born">Harvard Magazine</a>. There was a lot going on scientifically in a remarkably supportive and creative atmosphere, even though we were by no means a tier 1 CS program in those days. I have done my best to explain it here, but those of you who know what kind of atmosphere I always hoped for at Harvard may understand best what I am talking about. Hope you enjoy it!</p>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-64008039554403624502020-07-29T06:41:00.005-07:002020-07-29T06:52:46.114-07:00Harvard, Hong Kong, and China<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I used to visit Hong Kong regularly, and also made a few trips to mainland China. One of those trips put me in a provincial Chinese city on the morning of June 4, 2009, a day that seemed to be like any other when I awakened. After breakfast I flew to Hong Kong, where the people were afoot by the thousands. That night I attended the massive gathering in Victoria Park commemorating the 20<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPEpP6OuP7wdeX5_slkCMwrZaqD3aQnQsOaeptlorIYTzolRXN9k_67Rl9JY5yrb2fm4Lob0NPdQUKfQu3o2MvqgLw7ykudiLGhrnycQZxDb3c4QE9wqoWgL_D8NG5xWW2U_ifR3UcnP4/s2048/HK+2009.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPEpP6OuP7wdeX5_slkCMwrZaqD3aQnQsOaeptlorIYTzolRXN9k_67Rl9JY5yrb2fm4Lob0NPdQUKfQu3o2MvqgLw7ykudiLGhrnycQZxDb3c4QE9wqoWgL_D8NG5xWW2U_ifR3UcnP4/w500-h375/HK+2009.jpg" width="500" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">In 2013 I wrote several posts about the expansion of liberal arts colleges and universities into nations under authoritarian rule, for example <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-charade-of-liberal-arts-campuses-in.html" style="color: #954f72;">The Charade of Liberal Arts Campuses in Authoritarian States</a>. In a word, I couldn’t imagine how one would teach the Declaration of Independence in a country where political protest is suppressed, nor how to teach gender studies in a place where homosexuality is illegal. The professors would surely be tagged as enemies of the state and students who chose to study such texts would be put under surveillance. I observed that American universities were starting to <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/11/will-colleges-self-censor.html" style="color: #954f72;">self-censor</a> in order to live peacefully with their authoritarian host countries in the East.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But Hong Kong was a free city. I lectured on liberal education at universities there and advised Hong Kong U on its Common Core curriculum. I made friends there, and the academics took seriously their mandate to make the “two systems” philosophy work. Occasionally some stooge of the mainland government would make his presence known at a talk I was giving, but for the most part the audience behaved the way I expect college audiences to behave.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Then came the passage a few weeks ago of the “The Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” (Link <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1193142.shtml" style="color: #954f72;">here</a> to a Canadian site with the English language text of the law.) It is impossible to overstate the scope and significance of this law. The four offenses are described as “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorist activities,” and “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security,” each with a broad definition and a broadening rider, for example: “A person who incites, assists in, abets or provides pecuniary or other financial assistance or property for the commission by other persons of the offence under Article 22 of this Law shall be guilty of an offence.” Penalties are up to life imprisonment. The whole law is to be administered by a special force, not by Hong Kong police. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">And there is more. Companies that violate the law can be shut down. Turning in others may lighten your sentence. You don’t have to be in Hong Kong to commit an offense under the law. In fact, most ominously, “This Law shall apply to offences under this Law committed against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I am terrified for my Hong Kong friends. Some are among the most courageous people I know, having worked for years to document the misdeeds of the Chinese Communist Party in the face of extreme efforts to rewrite history, for example the June 4 history mentioned above. One Hong Kong U professor, Benny Tai, has already <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53567333" style="color: #954f72;">lost his job</a> because he participated in protests last year. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GBnabyjqHlI&t=25s" style="color: #954f72;">Watch this ABC news report.</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">“Implementation rules” for the new law provide for searches (even warrantless searches), preventing people from leaving Hong Kong if they are under investigation, and so on.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">To be sure, I will never go back to Hong Kong. Probably just discussing June 4 in this blog post is enough to trip one or more of the very flexible criteria laid out in the law.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But the reason I am blogging today is to ask how American universities will respond. Books started disappearing from Hong Kong libraries almost immediately after the law was enacted, as the ABC news report demonstrates. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Can Chinese students in the US read those books in an American university library? Well, they <i>can,</i> but will a professor who assigns them be putting those students under threat of arrest when they return home?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">But that is not the big problem this year. Most instruction in American universities will be “remote” this year, taking place over the Internet. Many students will be at home. There won’t be any international first year undergraduates, but there will, I imagine, be Harvard undergraduates physically in Hong Kong or on the mainland taking Harvard College courses for credit. All their readings will have to go through Chinese censorship—either the well-known Internet censorship of the mainland, or anticipatory censorship like that already taking place in Hong Kong libraries.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">British universities are facing the same challenge, and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/education-53341217" style="color: #954f72;">according to the BBC</a>, have made a very straightforward and yet strange decision: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 13.5pt 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #404040;">The pilot project involves four Russell Group universities - King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, York and Southampton - and is run by JISC, formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee, which provides digital services for UK universities.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 13.5pt 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #404040;">China's internet censorship means that some websites are filtered or blocked - and there have been concerns that students in China could not study online, such as clicking on an embedded link in a scholarly article.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 13.5pt 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #404040;">The technical solution, provided free by the Chinese internet firm Alibaba Cloud, creates a virtual connection between the student in China and the online network of the UK university, where the course is being taught.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 13.5pt 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #404040;">But a spokeswoman for JISC says Chinese students will not have free access to the internet, but will only be able to reach "resources that are controlled and specified" by the university in the UK. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 13.5pt 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #404040;">Any online information used in these UK university courses will have to be on a "security 'allow' list, which will list all the links to the educational materials UK institutions include in their course materials", said JISC.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0in 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Would Harvard agree to conditions like that? I hope not. But if not, how are undergraduates in Hong Kong or the mainland going to take courses in, say, Chinese history, or comparative politics? How, for that matter, could they read and discuss poetry about civil rights and personal freedom? How could they read English literature, <i>1984</i> for example? How could they read the founding philosophical texts of the Enlightenment, which laid the philosophical premise for the right of the American colonies to break away?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">I have heard no discussion of these questions. At Harvard, there are any number of individuals who might comment but have not, as far as I am aware. The Vice Provost for International Affairs is <a href="https://provost.harvard.edu/people/mark-c-elliott" style="color: #954f72;">a senior Chinese historian</a>. The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies is headed by another <a href="https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/profiles/michael-a-szonyi/" style="color: #954f72;">senior Chinese historian</a>. The chairman of the China Fund is <a href="https://hcf.fas.harvard.edu/people/" style="color: #954f72;">a professor of Chinese studies</a> who also holds a professorship in the Business School and was formerly the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Harvard’s president has won acclaim for his public statements and actions on DACA and on <a href="https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/ice-rescinds-international-order-response-to-harvard-mit-suit" style="color: #954f72;">ICE</a> policy changes. Other universities seem no more outspoken.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">Perhaps no one is commenting because everyone is tied up worrying about other things. To be sure, Covid-19 has created threats to universities that demand immediate attention. Still, one can’t help wondering if the large footprint of China in American universities may be making them cautious about antagonizing the Chinese government. What was once seen as an opportunity for universities to become global institutions may have rendered some of them so dependent on Chinese students, donations, and hosting arrangements that their business interests are tempering their voices, even as their academic counterparts in Hong Kong are losing their jobs and those at top mainland universities are being <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3093119/china-leadership-critic-xu-zhangrun-sacked-one-day-after" style="color: #954f72;">imprisoned and fired</a>. Follow the money.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">As I wrote seven years ago, you can’t offer a liberal education in an authoritarian state. And that is exactly what Harvard and other American universities would be trying to do if they offer their own courses, unadulterated, to students in China. Or Hong Kong. They would be putting both their students and the institutions themselves at risk of criminal sanctions. With all the varied collaborations American universities have with China, would they imperil themselves and their students? But if not, what choice do they have?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;">It is a tragedy for Hong Kong. But the loss to the future of global freedom is even greater. There was a time when students came to the US and learned here how free societies think about themselves and how they translate those ideals into governance structures. Even without the illiberal trends in the US, those days seem to be ending, as both the US and China become more nationalistic. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-70343823712506318512020-06-30T14:21:00.000-07:002020-06-30T14:22:23.072-07:00A Joyless Victory<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
The four-year fight over Harvard’s “USGSO” policy is over. (”Unrecognized Single Gender Social Organizations.”) But many questions remain.</div>
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This is the policy President Faust and Dean Khurana announced, without any prior public discussion, during spring reading period in 2016. It denied certain honors and privileges to members of single-gender clubs, clubs that had no Harvard space or official recognition. It was clear from the beginning that the policy was aimed at the old male Final Clubs, as the policy was represented early on as a response to the problem of campus sexual assault (the vast majority of which are attacks by men on women) and to pernicious social class hierarchy. Data were presented in support of the first rationale, which withered under scrutiny and was never mentioned again. No attempt was ever made to back up the charge of social or ethnic exclusivity with hard data, though it always seemed clear that even the ritziest of the Final Clubs was far more ethnically diverse than (say) the Black Men’s Forum or the Asian American Sisters in Service, both fully legitimate Harvard-sponsored organizations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The sanctions had little effect on the Final Clubs. A year or so ago I had lunch at a restaurant in Harvard Square with an undergraduate, and as we were chatting a series of men with athletic physique and impeccable attire came by and exchanged fist bumps and grunted greetings with my companion. “Recruiting?” I naively asked. “No,” he replied. “Punch season.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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But the sanctions all but wiped out the women’s clubs, which did not have the real estate, the alumni backing, or the stabilizing traditions of the men’s clubs. Parties including sororities sued Harvard in Massachusetts and Federal courts, and successfully beat back Harvard’s motion to dismiss in both venues. It was Judge Gorton’s opinion in the federal case that President Bacow cited in <a href="https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/policy-on-unrecognized-single-gender-social-organizations" style="color: #954f72;">dropping the policy</a> yesterday, noting that its reasoning was consistent with the majority opinion in the recent Supreme Court decision about LGBTQ employee rights. (Two weeks ago <a href="http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2020/06/because-of-sex.html" style="color: #954f72;">I pointed out</a> that assonance and why I thought it spelled trouble for Harvard’s USGSO policy.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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So what more is there to say?<o:p></o:p></div>
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First, President Bacow’s retreat on the policy is minimalist, as is Dean Khurana’s supporting statement. Harvard does not acknowledge that the policy was wrong; only that it was likely to be interpreted as technically illegal under a peculiar interpretation of Title VII by a couple of judges. So from a purely personal standpoint, I find the outcome unsatisfying, because I never would have guessed that the policy was unlawful—only unwise and, in restraining students’ freedom of association off-campus, out of step with the spirit of American civil rights. (That is why the American Constitution Society <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG0O2f5I8SU" style="color: #954f72;">debate</a> held on this topic in November 2016 referred to the policy violating “First Amendment values,” not the First Amendment itself.) President Bacow writes of Judge Gorton’s opinion in denying Harvard’s motion to dismiss,<o:p></o:p></div>
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[T]he court accepted the plaintiffs’ legal theory that the policy, although adopted to counteract discrimination based on sex, is itself an instance of discrimination based on sex.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Now that way of putting it suggests that there is something absurd</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"> in the judge’s reasoning, that Harvard’s good intentions should be to its credit in this battle, that you have to tie your brain in a pretzel to make sense of the logical trap into which Harvard fell. That “we’re still right about this” posture echoes through Dean Khurana’s accompanying </span><a href="https://college.harvard.edu/about/deans-messages/policy-unrecognized-single-gender-social-organizations" style="color: #954f72; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">statement</a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">. I would have been happier to think that Harvard leadership had realized that the policy was not just technically wrong but fundamentally misguided, particularly for an educational institution. We should not be teaching students that the way to respond to social problems is to limit the ways in which citizens can peaceably assemble. </span><br />
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Second, substitute “race” for “sex” in the sentence quoted above, and you have pretty much the basis for the <a href="https://admissionscase.harvard.edu/" style="color: #954f72;">SFFA lawsuit against Harvard</a>, which is now in the hands of a US Court of Appeals. <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/06/harvard-rescinds-single-gender-club-rules" style="color: #954f72;">Harvard Magazine</a> does a good job teasing out the uncomfortable implications for Harvard if that case makes it to the Supreme Court and that Court continues this line of reasoning.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A third consequence of the narrowness of the institutional concession is that it leaves open the possibility of a new policy taking squarer aim at the Final Clubs, or some larger set of off-campus organizations. Harvard could, for example, adopt a policy prohibiting (or penalizing) membership in an organization that costs money to join, unless it waives those fees for students who can’t afford to pay them. No Title VII protections would come into play, I suppose. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Fourth, none of this settles the question of those lawsuits. Harvard has acknowledged it would lose them (or at least the federal case). What happens now? Does Harvard have to pay the plaintiffs? Does it have to do something to restore the women’s clubs it crushed? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, as the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/29/metro/harvard-will-drop-policy-targeting-all-male-final-clubs/" style="color: #954f72;">Globe</a> reported this morning, the plaintiffs had yesterday filed a <a href="https://www.standuptoharvard.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Harvard-PI-Brief-06-29-20.pdf" style="color: #954f72;">motion</a> for an injunction against Harvard, apparently only hours before the Corporation vote and the president’s announcement. That motion is based on discovery of Harvard internal deliberations, which are unsurprising but damning. To quote (omitting citations to exhibits).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Evidence adduced in discovery reveals, however, that the Sanctions Policy (or something very much like it) was in the works long before May 2016; that the process for adopting the Policy was infused with sex stereotypes and anti-male bias; and that the Implementation and USGSO Committees were constituted to do little more than add a veneer of process to decisions already made by Harvard’s administrators long before. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In an internal memo and presentation prepared in late 2015 and early 2016, the architect of the Sanctions Policy—Dean Rakesh Khurana—declared that he wanted to punish men who join men’s groups because men’s groups “jeopardize safety.” These documents show that Khurana already planned to target men’s organizations long before Harvard formed any committee or engaged in any kind of deliberative process, and that he was motivated to do so by a view that men’s groups are categorically unsafe places. The documents also show that the supposed “gender equity” rationale for the Policy was nothing but messaging. In a list of “pros” for targeting all single-sex organizations as a way of eliminating men’s groups, Khurana wrote that this ostensibly even-handed approach would improve “public relations: ‘University committed to gender equity.’” <o:p></o:p></div>
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In an email and attachment sent to Dean Khurana on March 2, 2016, Harvard’s then- President Drew Faust expressed similar anti-male bias in supporting adoption of the Sanctions Policy. Faust declared that “the continuing hegemony of exclusive all male Final Clubs over undergraduate social life is deeply disturbing.” In her view, men’s groups—which she characterized as “overwhelmingly white and largely financially well-off men”—“yield disproportionate numbers of sexual assaults” as “the product of the hierarchical, gendered assumptions that form the very basis for [their] existence.” <i>Id. </i>“These organizations and the attitudes their current structure -- all male, unsupervised access to alcohol, exclusivity of male membership --inevitably encourages pose real dangers,” including to “fundamental physical safety.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Numerous other previously unavailable documents show that sex stereotypes and anti- male bias shaped the Policy and drove its adoption. In internal Harvard documents, men’s organizations are consistently described as places of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and sexual violence; women are consistently described as unequal, victimized, and disempowered; and women’s organizations are disregarded as an unfortunate consequence of men’s organizations, existing solely as a mechanism to cope with exclusion from men’s spaces. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Today is my last day as Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science; starting tomorrow I will be “Gordon McKay Research Professor,” a fancy way of saying that I will be retired but active. It is a happy day for me, but not because it’s a day I am particularly proud to be a Harvard alumnus or faculty member. I am glad that the USGSO policy is no more and grateful to the many alumni and faculty who supported the effort to get rid of it. They are a wonderfully diverse group, starting with the three co-authors of the op-ed <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/9/13/against-values-tests/" style="color: #954f72;">No Values Tests</a> back in the fall of 2016, Margo Seltzer, Eric Nelson, and Richard Thomas. We all took some heat from our faculty colleagues and even from our institutional leaders. No matter. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But what a colossal waste of time, money, and good will this policy has been for Harvard. Good riddance. I wish I could be more confident the University had learned something from the experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-25270159711393361292020-06-16T19:22:00.002-07:002020-06-29T14:45:31.333-07:00Because of sexThere was a striking coincidence between the legal reasoning in the Supreme Court's opinion outlawing employment discrimination against gay and transgendered people, and the reasoning of Judge Gorton when he denied Harvard's motion to dismiss the federal suit against the University filed by certain single-gender organizations. I wrote up that decision in a post called <a href="https://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2019/08/but-for.html">But For</a>, because the key point in the opinion was that Harvard was discriminating on the basis of sex because it would not have been against Harvard policy for a woman to join an all-male Final Club or fraternity. The fact that the club would not have welcomed her was irrelevant.<br />
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In the <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf">opinion</a> written by Justice Gorsuch in the momentous Supreme Court decision earlier this week, an almost identical fact pattern was at stake."<span style="font-family: inherit;">Clayton County, Georgia, fired Gerald Bostock for conduct `unbecoming' a county employee shortly after he began participating in a gay recreational softball league." Had he been a woman joining that league, she would not have been fired. But for his sex, he could have </span>kept<span style="font-family: inherit;"> his job and joined the league. So he was fired because of his sex. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That is sex discrimination and unlawful under federal law, we now know. Of course</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Harvard's clubs do not present an employment situation. Still, if the case goes to trial it seems ever clearer that Harvard is going to </span>have<span style="font-family: inherit;"> a hard time explaining why its policy against students joining </span>single<span style="font-family: inherit;"> gender organizations is not sex discrimination. I have no idea what the state of play in that case is, and actually hadn't thought about the Harvard clubs for quite awhile; but Gorsuch and Gorton certainly sound a </span>great<span style="font-family: inherit;"> deal alike!</span>Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3116442395849122822.post-9790121272536630422020-05-02T19:16:00.001-07:002020-05-03T07:47:49.834-07:00A question unanswered in the Epstein reportIt was inevitable that <a href="https://ogc.harvard.edu/files/ogc/files/report_concerning_jeffrey_e._epsteins_connections_to_harvard_university.pdf">the Harvard report </a>(released, in classic style, on a Friday afternoon) would raise as many questions as it answered. It is lawyerly (not surprising, it was written by lawyers) and focused on Harvard rules and policies. I find it very damaging to the reputation of Harvard's faculty, and rather reassuring about the integrity of Harvard's leadership. At one crucial juncture in 2013 (page 11), a development office staffer writes a bloodless memo to Harvard leadership describing the interest shown by the chair of the Math department and the dean for Science in raising more money from Epstein, even though he was by now a sex criminal. The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the President said no, and they deserve credit for their good judgment. The system worked, to that extent. The question would be how those advocating for accepting the money came to the conclusion that "<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">the good his support can do for Professor Nowak’s research outweighs the reputational risk of accepting further funds from him. In addition, they e</span><span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">mphasize both that Epstein has served his time for his crime, and that his wealth has been obtained legally, having nothing to do with the crime for which he was convicted." I have some opinions on all that, as others do as well. But I would like to point to a different question.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">On page 18, footnote 13 reads as follows:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A number of the Harvard faculty members we interviewed also acknowledged that they visited Epstein at his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico or the Virgin Islands, visited him in jail or on work release, or traveled on one of his planes. Faculty members told us that they undertook these off-campus activities primarily in their personal capacities rather than as representatives of Harvard. These actions did not implicate Harvard rules or policies</span></blockquote>
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Now first of all, <i>what</i> "number"? That is a lot of travel if the number of involved faculty is small, and a lot of travel if the number of involved faculty is large. Who are these people who kept buzzing around Epstein? We probably know some of the names, but perhaps not all.<br />
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The big question is "why?" Why did these distinguished Harvard faculty continue to consort with Epstein? We know that some of them wanted more money for their Harvard programs, but there seems to be something more going on. Some of them apparently thought Epstein was brilliant, or were at least willing to tell the Harvard administration they thought so. (Dan Dennett and Steve Pinker, to their credit, s<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/jeffrey-epstein-grift-hooking-scientists-up-with-super-rich">eem to have figured out early on</a> that Epstein was intellectually a phony.)<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So what I really would like to know in this context is how to parse the phrase "primarily in their personal capacities rather than as representatives of Harvard." Plainly, under even the most generous interpretation, Harvard's reputation stood to be damaged by an aggregation of academic suitors being solicitous of a sex offender. We all have private lives that are not Harvard's business, but if three Harvard professors go out to dinner with a rich criminal, Harvard is automatically implicated.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am most interested in a specific question raised by the quoted phrase. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Joi Ito, sometime head of the Media Lab at MIT, had to resign when it was disclosed that he, like Nowak, had allowed Epstein to get uncomfortably close to the institution he headed. In some ways, the Harvard situation seems worse to me than the MIT situation, because Ito was responsible for raising enormous amounts of money just to keep the Media Lab running. It is a crazy financial model that creates terrible incentives, which is not to excuse Ito's conduct. But the Harvard Math department was in no danger of going out of business if the chair of the department failed to raise a single dollar. What happened at Harvard looks to me more like ethically obtuse expansionist greed than what happened at the Media Lab. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But Ito committed another affont to commonly accepted values. At the same time as he was raising money from Epstein for the Media Lab, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-funded-mit-media-lab-director-joichi-ito-confirms-2019-8">he was raising money from Epstein for his own venture fund.</a> There may have been no rule against that--do we really need such rules?--but anyone with the feeblest ethical sense would recognize it as a conflict of interest that, at a minimum, would require disclosure, and almost certainly would have been stopped had MIT known what was going on, as it did not. As it was, it seemed that Ito was using his ability to get MIT to accept Epstein's gift to the Media Lab, thereby repairing Epstein's damaged reputation, as leverage on Epstein to get him to support Ito's personal investment fund.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So my question about the "number of Harvard faculty members" mentioned in footnote 13: Was any of them personally profiting from their association with Epstein? If their business with Epstein was conducted "primarily in their personal capacities," did those </span>personal<span style="font-family: inherit;"> capacities in any way involve building their personal wealth?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Just asking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Added May 3.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">1) On my bottom line question, the report is silent as far as I can see, but it does mention in footnote 6 (page 10) an Epstein gift to a nonprofit foundation headed by a Harvard professor (one whose husband, also a Harvard professor, appears in a photograph with Epstein).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">2) A colleague has suggested that the situation of those trying to raise a second round of Epstein money for the PED parallels Ito's situation with the Media Lab more closely than I suggest above: in both cases they would go under and there would be layoffs if more money could not be raised. It is true (page 16 of the report) that Epstein's $6.5 million dollar gift had been spent down by 2013, and while he was not the only donor, PED apparently did need to keep raising money to stay afloat. It's much smaller than the Media Lab -- 8 graduate students, 5 postdocs, 2 research associates, a couple of administrative staff, and a single professor, according to the program's <a href="https://ped.fas.harvard.edu/ped_people">web site</a> right now. A fair parsing of this would get us into a different ball of wax: how we professors learn to use terms like "essential" and "urgent" to describe favored programs when we want to start or to keep them going or to use them to recruit desirable faculty, even though they are a drain on the institution's unrestricted money and, most of the time, Harvard (or MIT) would function just fine without them. A story for another day.</span><br />
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Harry Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17088418333536732728noreply@blogger.com1